Ten years ago, social media did not play a major role in Germany. Anyone who had ever heard of Facebook and Twitter often wondered what they were all about. Blogs were more of a niche. That's when the Daimler blog started. Nine months after its launch, it won the " Best of Corporate Publishing Award " in the special formats electronic publishing category.
I interviewed Uwe Knaus, the chief blogger at Daimler, about this . Today, after almost ten years – during which we have always been in touch within our network and have met each other in person – Uwe is still responsible for the Daimler blog. However, his area of responsibility has expanded: from responsibility for Daimler's social media strategy (2010 to the end of 2016), he also took on platform responsibility for the corporate website at the beginning of 2017.
But some things have also remained surprisingly the same, for example linkedin data the appreciation for employee bloggers as convincing brand ambassadors. Here are my questions and Uwe Knaus' answers.
Update November 2019: Uwe Knaus has just announced that the Daimler blog will be discontinued and will be incorporated into a magazine. However, proven authors from the company are still involved. In this detailed interview in UPLOAD magazine, he and his colleague Sven Sattler explain the background.
Kerstin Hoffmann: The Daimler blog – one of the oldest and most awarded corporate blogs in Germany – recently celebrated its tenth anniversary. Now it is getting a “new look”, as you call it. What exactly does that mean?
Uwe Knaus: The "new dress" is actually just a small gift for the 10th birthday. It brings the Daimler blog closer in appearance to our corporate website . We have mainly revised the stage area of the homepage, the image formats and the header area of the article pages. With the new background image, we can now give the Daimler blog a face over a longer period of time. To start with, we chose a piece of asphalt from a pit lane as the background motif.
In terms of functionality, the Daimler blog is state-of-the-art. With voice output via narando and voice control via Alexa, we are technically a step ahead of most blogs.