I’ll risk losing a number of cool points here by admitting that I’m a fan of the band Chicago. The band, as you might know, made the decision early in their careers that their record covers would not feature the band members but instead the band’s logo. The decision was an attempt to keep the personalities in the band secondary to the music, a strategy that worked pretty well until the early 1980s, when Peter Cetera wound up dominating and the band decided to pursue more commercial friendly pastures.

That springs to my mind every time the question of who should be involved in a corporate blog comes up. Paul Chaney at Marketing Profs Daily Fix does just that, once again exploring the question of whether a corporate blog should be a single author effort or one that brings in multiple people from within the company.

Paul concludes, and I completely agree with this, that if possible there should be more than one behind the blog. He lists a handful of reasons why it makes sense from a search point of view to have as many people piling on the thing as you can. But the most important, I think, is the third:

It gives the company many human touch points.

Even if you don’t go as far someone like Microsoft or Sun with their hundreds of employee blogs and just have two or three people contributing to a single blog, there’s a lot of value there. It gives readers - whether they be potential business partners, industry watchers or media that are looking for pull quotes - a variety of people to get to know.

It’s kind of been just me here on Inside.Spout so far but as things straighten out I’m going to be encouraging others here to chime in from time to time on issues they’re authoritative and informed on, probably introducing themselves first so you, the reader, can get to know them and their voices.

Andy Angelos on the Zocalo Group blog also serves up a healthy reminder that’s important for corporate blogging efforts: It’s more important to measure the quality of the viewers than the quantity. Corporate blogs are, by definition, meant for a niche audience. While there can certainly be a broader audience in some case (especially if you’re using your blog not so much for company perspectives but as an extension of your customer service efforts) for the most part it’s going to be a handful of targeted readers that tune in time and time again.