Blog Different

Pundits vilified Chrysler when the company launched The Firehouse, its corporate blog, in 2005. The reason: Chrysler executives opted to make the blog available only to bona fide journalists.

By daring to experiment with a private journalists-only blog, Chrysler was "completely misunderstanding the point of a corporate weblog," according to AdRants’ Steve Hall. B.L. Ochman wrote that Chrysler’s "move ... shows how completely clueless they are about blogging," in her What’s Next blog. TheFirehouse.biz, the pundits widely opined, was doomed to fail.

Not. Fast forward to 2008. The Firehouse is alive, well, regularly tapped by the media, and directly responsible for a string of media hits that have helped polish the automaker’s public image.

Find out how and why Chrysler’s bloggers, former journalists all, bucked conventional wisdom to blaze their own path in the blogosphere, and the rewards that apparent risk delivered in the end.



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