After a few months of trial and error, we’ve gone live with the BMW Press Room. Built on a pretty average out the box blogging platform - technical requirements from server teams and IT departments we’ve managed to hack it apart and rebuild it to include a decent tag cloud, and social sharing links and bookmarks.

So I guess you can say BMW has launched their first “mainstream” blog (without comments). (I haven’t mentioned “blog” from and internal point of view as it has evil connotations. Blogs seem to spread fear into the hearts and minds of anyone with any involvement in marketing communications and press. “Press Room” sits more comfortably.)
While it may meet the definition of a blog on wikipedia …

“A blog … is a website where entries are written in chronological order and displayed in reverse chronological order.”

… the content is not written in a commentary style and comments have been disabled. So the purist in me says it’s not really a true blog, but anyway, who cares?

Apart from the numerous (and obvious) benefits from both user and SEO perspective, I think that there are a few other highlights that stand out:

- We’ve made the content available under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial) license.

- On an ongoing basis, BMW HQ release videos on Youtube via their channel. Many of these videos add to the experience and relevance of each post.

- A selection of RSS channels - give the reader what he/she is looking for.

- Social sharing and bookmarking (mentioned above).

I’d like to work a bit more on the What is RSS? page so that we can really educate the user on how to take advantage of RSS as a method to receive information in a central area etc.

If anyone has any useful RSS educational bits and pieces, please let me know in the comments (I’m thinking videos and diagrams that are informative and don’t put you to sleep).

Any other thoughts and comments?