TiVoBlog.com Blog Archive What’s Up With The “Official” TiVo Blog? Alex Raiano over at the unofficial TiVoBlog has a gripe this morning about TiVo’s official TiVo blog. From Alex’s blog this morning:
“Is it just me or have other people noticed that TiVo hasn’t been updating their blog all that often? Between Dec. 28th & Jan. 23rd the blog was never updated! What’s the sense in having a blog if you aren’t going to keep it up to date? There has been a lot of TiVo news as of late. Why wouldn’t TiVo use their blog to talk about CES news like the Series 3 TiVo or the fact that TiVoToGo for the Mac is on the way? Come on TiVo, I’m not going to give you a break on this one….”
I couldn’t agree more. The TiVo company blog is a joke. Not only is it poorly updated and missing important news but the fact that it moderates its comments is super lame. I’ve posted comments there that have never been published. In fact read through the comments and almost all are syrupy complimentary to the company. Although they skip posting my comments they’ll put up a comment on a post from someone saying nothing more than “merry Christmas.” Of course a comment on a TiVo post saying merry Christmas is super relevant but my comment about their RSS feeds being broken doesn’t make the cut.
Quite frankly the official TiVo Blog is a blog done wrong. Although they invite you to “join the conversation,” in reality it is really nothing more than a regurgitation of their press releases.
You want a blog done right? Then hire a Robert Scoble who will blog about your company warts and all. I’ll take Alex’s unofficial TiVo Blog (oh and so will Google by the way if you look at who’s blog comes up first) any day of the week over the official TiVo Blog. And what about Dave Zatz? Dave consistently has great and fresh TiVo stories. The funny thing is that in general what Dave and Alex are writing about is in fact not only more timely and relevant to TiVo but it’s mostly all pretty positive as well.
So here’s a clue TiVo if you really do want to join the conversation, hire (or heck don’t even hire just contract with) Alex or Dave and let them run the blog. Give them the room and latitude like Microsoft does Scoble and let them build more buzz for your product.
Recently Scoble put together a group of bloggers for dinner with Microsoft Senior exec Jim Allchin. This is smart. This builds buzz. And Scoble didn’t just invite a bunch of Microsoft kiss assess either, he invited folks from the Open Source community and it was a super positive thing to do. It showed that Microsoft is in fact serious about joining the conversation.
So what about putting a TiVo dinner together with a senior exec? I’d recommend Bob Pony. Watch Technorati and see who’s blogging about you and get Alex and Dave and some of the top posters in your TiVo forum together and see what happens.
And if you are going to have a corporate blog (and maybe you shouldn’t even have one) make sure it’s updated regularly, contains relevant news, doesn’t skip relevant news and has a free and open comments section (again if your stated desire about joining the conversation is in fact more than mere lip service).
And have someone who really follows your company and is passionate about it do your blog. Like I said, I’d recommend Alex or Dave, but hey it’s your blog, you make the call. Keep in mind though that it probably doesn’t look good to have the top TiVoblog search result per Google saying you look lame.