Company Thought Leader Blogs

I've been looking around at how companies use blogs. I see several types of blogs:

• A company blog, sometimes a blog per country (written in the local language)
• A page with an overview of official company bloggers. Usually these blogs are focused on product or market areas.

Some of these companies have several more bloggers, but they are not listed on the official blog page. These bloggers often clearly state they work for a certain company, but 'the musings on my blog are strictly personal'.

For some reason I find this strange. Why aren't these blog posts (with disclaimers) also listed on the page with official blogs? I think this has something to do with the old style of 'managing' communication. The official company blogs are basically controlled posts, somewhat different from official press releases (they have comments...!), but still pretty much the same.

In this model it would also mean that all our talk about our work and the company we work for with friends and family should consistently have a disclaimer. But it doesn't. It's not natural. Talking about your work and the experiences it brings is natural. Basically all this talk controlled and non-controlled is good. It's building your brand. It's showing to the world you have employees who are smart (- even when they convey disappointment about the companies vision or strategy). Your employees are your thought leaders. The communicate the culture of the organization to the world and take the feedback they get from friends and family back to work.

So if this is mixed in real-life, let's also mix it in our official communications.

What do you think? Do you know of companies that already actively mix communications? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Update May 31, 2010: Stowe Boyd recently wrote a great post about this topic underlining my point. Thanks, Stowe! The ReadWriteBlog also picked up his post.