Business Blog Wire

This series reviews corporate blogs (or the lack thereof) among Fortune 500 companies (the top 500 U.S.-based public corporations ranked by gross revenue).  This post will look at the blogging efforts of Chevron Corporation (NYSE: CVX).

I searched high and low for Chevron corporate blogs.  The Chevron website does have a news area where you can subscribe to a simple RSS feed for press releases, but no official public-facing blogs that I can find.

All is not lost, however. but the only blog that I suppose could be called a Chevron company blog is the Chevron Cars Blog.  That’s right, the collectible toy Chevron Cars!

The Chevron Cars Blog has a FeedBurner feed (see the privacy policy - hey, it says "blog website" there - funny).  Good job overall by ISL Consulting.  It’s even claimed in Technorati!  Which is more than I can say for a lot of bigtime business blogs.

Well - but it’s not really a business blog.  That is, the posts are typically user-submitted raves about these cutesy little collectible cars that Chevron has depicted for several years now in advertisements.  The comments don’t provide links to commenters’ websites or include permalinks for each comment (you’re not even allowed to reveal your last name).  You can include a hyperlink in a blog comment there, but there’s no instruction on how to do it.  It’s more a place where kids and collectors can casually congregate (10 points for alliteration?) than a place where anyone interested in Chevron, the company, can feel at home.

Which brings me to a question that I and others have posed before: What is a "corporate blog," anyway? :)  The Chevron Cars Blog sure doesn’t seem corporate in any sense except perhaps for the fact that a corporation is sponsoring it and a consulting firm is running it for that corporation.  It’s not about Chevron the company.  And that’s okay, of course.  I think this blog deserves at least a link from Chevron’s corporate website.  The fact that I had to go digging to find this blog makes me wonder if Chevron intended it to be somewhat separate or hidden from its main site.  I like the Chevron Cars Blog and I wish Chevron would start another corporate blog to discuss company goings-on.

P.S. Neville, I haven’t seen anything change in the seven months since you wondered what if Chevron had used a blog instead of a blogless, feedless discussion board at willyoujoinus.com (a Chevron-sponsored website discussing global energy issues).

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