How cool it would be

[seattlejoe]

Wouldn't be great if more Captains or even just crew members has personal blogs about their experiences at sea? I mean right now we just basically have Captain Albert (if you don't read his daily blogs you should really start, they are great) and the occasional blog update from the official HAL blog site. It could almost work as a marketing thing for the company saying that their crew love what they do. I wonder why this doesn't happen more. What are your thoughts on this.

 

p.s. Here's the link to Captain Albert's blog. At the moment he is master of the Prinsendam which is up the Amazon river right now. Very cool and interesting.

Captain Albert's Blog

[euro cruiser]

Marketing communications are generally tightly controlled, in any business.

 

From management's perspective, you want to maintain as much control as possible (which, admittedly, isn't much in the digital age, but we do what we can) over how your brand is portrayed. Also, the General Counsel would want to review everything before it hits the air, so to speak, to protect management and shareholders from potential lawsuits (or, more usually, from providing evidence that could damage the company in other actions) caused by an employee "representing" the company in the media.

 

From the employee's perspective, it doesn't sound like much fun - you'd be concerned all the time about saying something in print that puts your job in jeopardy.

[seattlejoe]

Thanks Euro for that great response. If only everyone on CC would respond so thorough.

Those are some great points and I do see how it could make companies nervous. I am not sure if you have ever read John Heald's blog (John is the senior cruise director for Carnival) but he often say some things that one would think could be threatening to his job. Captain Albert occasionally says some things about how his company needs to improve here or there. And I find that brave. But then again it probably helps being a Captain or the Senior Cruise Director to get away with that kind of stuff.

[euro cruiser]

Or, cynic that I am, his observations regarding needed improvements could be company approved ... because they are already working on making those changes.

 

I would be shocked if every word he publishes isn't corporate approved and, again being a cynic, I wouldn't believe it if he claimed otherwise.

 

Corporate pre-approval doesn't necessarily make his blog less interesting, or less valuable to the reader. In fact, if it does, they're doing it wrong!