Debbie Weil is known as the corporate blogging expert, and though she’s no doubt earned the title–she’s worked for clients including GlaxoSmithKline and the American College of Radiology–she can’t help but find humor in the name. “It’s so silly,” she says. “I have a daughter who’s a doctor, another daughter in med school, my son is a lawyer, and I sometimes think, corporate blogging expert–are you kidding? It’s not going to save the world. But it might change business.”
A former journalist who fell in love with the Web in 1993, Weil was one of the first people to discuss business blogging as a marketing tool in the early 2000s. “Every customer, B2B or B2C, is online. It’s a channel that’s hard to ignore,” she says. “Twitter, Facebook–the tools themselves are mostly free, and there’s a huge bang for the buck.”
After the success of The Corporate Blogging Book, which CIO Insight called one of the 10 most insightful books about Web 2.0, Weil is at work on another book that she says will have “something to do with this phenomenon people are calling government 2.0. The government will be more open, enabling citizens to make suggestions, be heard, and understand where the budget is going.”
But what she’s really excited about has nothing to do with corporate blogging–she recently became a grandmother, and can’t stop gushing. “Baby Dorothea! She’s adorable.”