As corporate blogs go, I sort of like Southwest Airline’s. They do a pretty good job covering all sorts of topics from opening new facilities and showing pictures of their mechanics performing maintenance on the their aircraft to discussing the impact of hurricane’s on their operations. Of course, being Southwest they also indulge in goofy pursuits like sharing their grandmother’s banana pudding recipes.
I think the blog is pretty effective for them as a forum for communicating information about their company and answering customer questions about the choices they make.
One thing they did recently which I thought could be especially effective for arts organizations is have an entry and podcast on how to work for the company and what to expect once you apply. (podcast doesn’t have permalinks so you’ll have to find the 9/24/08 episode.) They talk about all the crazy stuff people did to get noticed but also note how long it took some of these people to get hired given that they receive hundreds of thousands of applications every year.
Arts organizations taking a page from their book could talk about what people might expect working for the organization and what the place would expect of an applicant. This could help strengthen and diversify the applicant pool. I am partially thinking back to comments Andrew Taylor made last January about how arts organizations shouldn’t discount people simply because they don’t possess skills that have an exact one to one correlation to the job description they wrote. It is great to hire true believers who have already invested their hearts in your industry but in the long run more dispassionate new blood might lead to a healthier situation.
If you don’t have the resources to maintain a running blog or podcast, it would probably still be beneficial to have a one or two recorded conversations with people talking about their experiences with the company posted in the Human Resources portion of your website. The emotion transmitted in a voice is certainly compelling than a lengthy text account of the same information.