Alright. Back to the Fortune 500 Blog Project. I was halfway done with Disney yesterday. I was supposed to come back and finish up last night, but I got busy.

Anyway. Now, after I posted the previous post, I got some comments, and some emails – and it seems that I have originally misinterpreted what I have observed. I’m truly sorry and I apologise for any inconvenience caused. I was really listing the URLs that linked to a blog that could be by Disney or Disney’s employees.

Interestingly, I learnt a lot with the help from the editor of The Disney Blog, John Frost. From what he mentioned (again I shall specify that this is also based on the best of his knowledge),

For some reason The Disney Company has no ‘official’ blogs public in the net… there are enough fan blogs, so I guess they don’t have to.

John also commented that Disney used to tell their employees not to blog about their work. Considering that Disney’s entertainment is really about creating magic (and they really really do!), it is just appropriate and fair to blog about it, just in case anyone may “ruin the magic”.

Thanks John for your input. I really really do appreciate it!

Looking back, that means to me that all those URLs listed earlier are unofficial blogs. I’ve checked them individually too, and its true. They are blogs really dedicated to Disney and/or Pixar, but all of them are not affiliated to Disney or Pixar.

Just to be doubly sure, I ran a check on Technorati and Google BlogSearch today and yep, the number of fan blogs really come in the hundreds, but there isn’t any sign of any single one being the official Disney corporate blog.

So well.. I’m really wondering now where I read once before that Disney had started a corporate blog. Haha… My mistake!

Fan Blogs and Fan Sites

One very important difference about The Disney Company in this project is while they do not have an official corporate blog (some employees may blog but they may be just personal blogs), they have A LOT of fan sites and blogs, and these sites talk about everything, from their experiences in the amusement parks, to the movies and videos, to the cartoon characters, to the merchandise.

Does Disney need an official corporate blog then?

How could Disney benefit from one? I noted that J. Craig Williams posted in his blog (dated in 2005), that

…Disneyland’s new President Matt Ouimet spoke to an organization I belong to…. I asked him if Disney would consider blogging … I believe we can expect a Disney corporate blog soon.

Well, what could have happened? Maybe they went back and they realised they don’t need an official blog, because people are already blogging so much about them.

My personal opinion to this is that Disney could have one to release official news about their upcoming products and movies for example, instead of using press releases. In that way, fans could take advantage of the feeds to get the latest news on the spot.

What do you think?

On I go with the Fortune 500 Blog Project, and today I’ll be going to Disney.com – the land of Mickey, Donald and all the rest. :mrgreen:The feeling is a little different because I already know Disney has blogs. So my job is not to find blogs, but to find what these blogs do and how they are used! *excited*

Pardon me, I haven’t slept last night, fiddling with my blog and surfing around. Haha… Let’s start!

Disney.com Website

The Disney website is cartooney! Erm… *duh*. There is a separate URL for corporate information. No obvious sign of blogs.

Website search for “blog”. Whoa! 337 entries. But most of them are similar. Here are the distinct ones.

1. Catherine Newman Blog on Parenting
2. A “blog” within Disney’s incubaTor

Most of the results came under the subdomain http://wondertime.go.com, which is actually a magazine site under Go.com,

dedicated to helping parents nurture their children’s love of learning. A blend of how and why, Wondertime inspires moms of infants through 6-year-olds to see the world through the eyes of their children, and to celebrate the wonder of this all-too-fleeting time.

The Catherine Newman blog listed is owned by Wondertime, not Disney.

The second link does not really link to a blog either! Its a… erm… website. I don’t really get what is going on on that page. It just like a showcase of a kid who has done wonders. 🙂

I’ll search again, this time for “corporate blog”. One result. Eww… it leads to something like a news release – announcing that ABC.com has released some new features and among these are some blogs.

Google Search Then!

Yes! Blogs! Lots of them! I’ll just list the more interesting stuff here – too much going on about Disney blogs

1. The Unofficial Disney blog or the typepad URL
2. Luxo, a blog featuring some stuff by Pixar, and since Disney acquired Pixar, that makes it related to Disney
3. Re-Imagineering, A forum for Pixar and Disney professionals – don’t know yet if it is BY them, I’ll list it here first anyway.
4. A fellow blogger who has previously done research on Disney’s blogs in Feb 2004
5. A blog talking about law stuff – they seem to be talking a lot about Disney, but they don’t seem to be affiliated to Disney at all.
6. Mouse Kingdom Blog
7. A section of Yahoo directory dedicated to Disney related blogs! – this should get me going for some time!
8. A photo blog featuring Disney stuff
9. Someone’s blog dedicated to Disney – don’t know if he’s an Employee or not.
10. A site for people to create blogs for their trip to Disneyland!

I’m not certain at this time if any of these are owned by Disney or Disney’s employees yet, but, I’ll stop here for Google results – heh. So many more results, but from observation, most are people’s blogs about Disney. Some are just individual posts, and some are really blogs dedicated for Disney news.

I’ll stop here for today and continue when I get back home tonight to continue my search on Technorati and the other search engines, and then we’ll dive deeper into the individual links to see what they are about!

I thought of doing one Fortune 500 Blog Review a day, but since I’m in the momentum, I might as well get another review done. Up next.. sweeet The Hershey Company!

Company Website

The Hershey’s website is beautiful! Lots of nice pictures, kids, fun, and guess the base color of the theme? *Duh* Blogs wise, nothing much there. They have another separate URL for their corporate information. Searched there. None. No blogs. They have receipes, press releases, and newsletters though. On the recipes page, they have a daily featured recipe… but its nothing near a blog.

Its interesting to learn that Hersheys is not only about chocolate… its about attractions too, fun, kids, even golf!

Technorati.

Nothing official too. The blogs that showed were blogs about candies and food.

On to Google.

Nothing here. Got results like Junk Food Blog. BlogSearch Google. There are a couple of entries about their recent acquisition of organic chocolate company Dagoba and visits to the Hershey’s Chocolate World, but none from Hershey’s themselves or their employees.

Next on Yahoo!

Candy blogs, chocolate blogs, I’m craving for dessert at 2am now!

Naaah… again, no corporate blogs by Hershey’s as yet.

I’m not a very big chocolate fan, but I do love chocolate. Wouldn’t it be good if they have a blog to answer questions on their recipes and collect feedback and comments not only on their products, but also on how their sweeeet Hershey’s kisses helped made one’s day ;), or to announce news about their attractions?

Let me know if you find any corporate blogs by Hershey’s or for that matter, any blogs dedicated to Hershey’s products, attractions and services.

Since this is my first Fortune 500 blogs review, I’ll just type anything and everything I do and observed as I make my journey to unravel any blogging business in Capital One or the lack of.

Capital One Website. Front page – no sign of the word blog. Searched “blog” … The reply was “There were no results for blog. Here are the results for log.” (Nice. They check for misspellings in their searches)

Googled site:capitalone.com blog and the variants – web log, weblog, blogs, web logs, weblogs… Nothing.

Googled “Capital One” Blog and the variants. Ooooh… Lots of other sites, but nothing official.

On to Technorati. One blog! Its by an employee, more of a personal one, talking about life at work. Six posts, started on February 24th, 2006.

I learnt one thing from the blog.

There’s (apparently) long been a tradition in Cap One’s IT department of giving a Lava Lamp to anyone who makes a particularly memorable schoolboy error.

Google Finance and Google Blog Search! Lots of blogs, all talking about their experience with the service and the credit cards and selling and buying of their shares… and hey! I found my previous post! Oh… I took 57 mins already.

Nothing on Yahoo Directory too!

So, it looks like there are no official corporate blogs by Capital One! The closest were press releases and newsletters. But no blogs.

Most sites that turned out under the search were either regular bloggers talking about issues related to Capital One like phishing and interest rates, or just regular blogs with Capital One ads in their Yahoo! Search Marketing or Google Ads.

I think they could do with a blog to address issues like the top ranking website when I searched for “Capital One” blog – a complaint site, or sites like this.

Do you think Capital One get started with a blog? From my hour of search experience, I have a feeling they are gonna get a good number of comments on their blog when they start one (if they ever do).

So, what’s in your wallet? Now, there are credit cards, loans and financing, direct banking… anything and everything but blogs.

Finally, I’m more or less done with the miscellaneous stuff I have to settle, and I can get started on the work for the Fortune 500 Blogs Project. I came by this project after surfing on to Business BlogWire and the author Easton was asking for volunteers for a corporate blogging group project.

So I dived into it.

So what is this project about? Here’s the description on the wiki.

The Fortune 500 Blog Project is an independent, volunteer-driven project to identify and evaluate public-facing corporate blogs owned and/or operated by Fortune 500 companies. Secondary purposes of this project include finding out to what degree Fortune 500 companies are using internal corporate blogs, and highlighting blogs that discuss Fortune 500 companies.

Here is the offical list of Fortune 500 companies.

So I picked five to start with, Disney, 3M, Capital One, Harrah’s Entertainment and Hersheys.

Actually in my daily surfing I have came across two other similar projects – the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki, and Fortune 500 Blogs

Time to me start on my research!

Oh, and if you are interested to participate, please do! It’ll be fun! You can read Easton’s post with more details about signing up.