Fortune 500 Blog Review – How Many Are Using Their Blogs For Recruitment

Over the next few weeks, Easton Ellsworth of Business Blog Wire is going to conduct a review of public-facing blogs operated by Fortune 500 companies. Easton hopes to engage his readers in a discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of each corporate blog so that we can learn from what they are doing right and wrong – and most importantly – what we all could be doing better. Here are Easton’s key questions for his review:

1. “Quality - Out of all the Fortune 500 companies with public-facing corporate blogs, who’s got the best blog or set of blogs? What does “best” mean in this context?
2. Uniqueness - How do Fortune 500 company blogs differ from non-Fortune 500 company blogs?
3. Quantity- How many public-facing (external), official Fortune 500 corporate blogs are there?
4. Relevance - Is the Fortune 500 a useful barometer in terms of telling us how quickly businesses of all sizes are turning to blogs for various purposes?
5. Identity - Who’s writing F500 blogs anyway? Is it senior executives or low-level employees? Are these mostly team blogs or individual blogs?
6. Format - How often are these blogs updated? What are their designs like? Are they registered with Technorati and other blog search engines? Do they allow comments and/or trackbacks? What kind of blog bling (read: fancy-pants buttons and sidebar gizmos) do they have?
7. Impact - Who reads them and why? How important are these big biz blogs? Why hasn’t anyone scoured and publicly evaluated them as a collective yet?
8. Wild Card – How come the HP corporate blog portal has such a crazy URL? Does Intel really have a corporate blog? What about General Mills? Does Real Baking with Rose Levy Beranbaum count? (Does that really matter?) And so on and so forth”

I firmly believe that the success of a corporation is heavily determined by the quality of the people they are able to recruit and retain. I would be interested in knowing what companies are using their public blog to promote their employer brand and connect with talented job candidates.

I was hoping that Easton might revise #7 on his list to discuss which of the F500 blogs overtly use the blog for recruiting in addition to their normal content. Who is doing it well – who isn’t doing it at all? So, what do you think Easton? Maybe EXCELER8ion can help collaborate on the project?

Technorati Tags: business blogs, company blogs, corporate blogs, blogging, recruiting blogs, jobs blogs