Cutting Through reports on General Motors entry into blogging:

I’ve mentioned GM and their blogs a couple of times in the last week or so - now there's another first from them. The Director of New Media from GM Communications has been interviewed for a podcast, conducted over Skype. How's that for innovative?

It's an interesting insight into how GM have gone about using blogs as part of their communications strategy, but there are a couple of exchanges in particular which are worth seeing / hearing:

Neville: Who are the commenters? customers, employees, dealers? Are you happy and pleased with the spread of commenting?

Michael: I was completely blown away by the level of comments and the thought that goes into those comments. We didn't know what to expect and in many cases you feel that people have been waiting for years and years to be able to vent their feelings to General Motors, so even the negative ones aren’t sniping, they're just giving us their sincere feelings and thoughts on what we can do to create better products. We're appreciating most of them!

The response speaks clearly to the fact that some of the folks at GM at least really do 'get it.' Organizations almost always get in trouble when they try to control the message too tightly. People want to be listened to. And they want to know that 'real' people are speaking to them. It'll be interesting to see how GM and blogging go forward.