Business Blog Wire

I couldn’t find any other official, public-facing blogs by GM besides the Fastlane and FYI blogs.  Let me know if you can find any more.

Despite the Fastlane blog’s greater popularity (about 30 times as many Google backlinks and a much higher Technorati ranking), I actually prefer the FYI blog.  The designs are virtually identical - just a different color splash and minor sidebar differences on each blog - but I personally find the FYI posts more engaging and, well, fun.

GM’s blogs carry a simple design and are somewhat lacking in functionality, but they at least do the most important thing right: they establish a conversation that is informative and easy to participate in.

You can expect about five to seven posts a week at the FYI blog and about one or two a week at Fastlane.

Some suggestions for both GM blogs:
- Add multiple categories to each post if necessary and tell us which category(-ies) correspond to a given post
- Place the feed subscription options much higher up on the right, and simplify them
- Post more regularly at Fastlane - it’s a bit sporadic
- Claim your blogs in Technorati, GM!
- Get rid of the calendar in the sidebar
- Update the "Blogs We Like" area in the sidebar - it just seems a bit aged and crusty
- Allow us to see all posts by a given author
- Give each blog author her own personal "about" page, accessible via a link in her name in each post byline
- Assign a permalink to each comment
- Split super-long pages into smaller chunks (the comment threads can get pretty long at times!)

If I had more time, I would investigate whether Bob Lutz (or any of the other authors for that matter) actually respond to comments in the comment thread or even through follow-up posts.  They hopefully do sometimes.

For some extra background on the GM blogs, I tip the hat to Debbie Weil, John Cass, and Dave Taylor.

What questions do you have about GM’s corporate blogs?  How effective do you think they are?  What do you like/dislike about them?

UPDATE: Sorry, I hit post too soon.  Please check out the about and contact pages at GM’s Fastlane blog.  Simple, yes, but at least you get a sense of the blog’s purpose and can tell how to talk to a human being in charge of it.

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