One of my earlier posts focused on why companies should have a blog, so let’s move past the question of should we blog and on to the discussion of how to write more effective corporate blogs.
Guiding Principles
At this point, I suggest reading my Social Media and Social Networking Best Practices for Business post. Specifically, I covered these guiding principles, which apply not just to blogging, but to other forms of social media as well:
- Be sincere
- Focus on the individuals
- Not all about you
- Be part of the community
- Everyone’s a peer
Each of these 5 guiding principles has already been described in detail in my other post, so I won’t spend much more time on them here, but they are important for corporate bloggers to keep in mind.
Strategy and Vision
Blogs are still just another piece of the corporate communications puzzle (although an increasingly important piece), so spending some quality time thinking about what you want to achieve with your overall communication strategy and how blogging fits into that strategy is a good place for companies to start. You don’t want to use your blog to just pimp your products or talk about press releases. A blog can be used for so much more. Think about the areas where you want to lead the industry and the topics that you want people to think about when they think of your company. Use your blog to become a thought leader in the industry by sharing your expertise on those broad topics that are important and relevant to your company.
Think about who should be blogging on your corporate blog. It is easy to pick your top 5 executives, and give them access to the blog. In some cases, they might be the perfect people, but they aren’t always the best choice when it comes to accomplishing your goals for the blog. Go back to your discussion about your strategy for the blog and the topics that you want people to think about when they think of your company or your products. Who in your company has expertise in those areas? Do you have someone with great ideas? Are there any evangelists or other employees passionate about those topics? If so, recruit those people to contribute to your blogs. Someone passionate and smart, but outside of the senior management ranks probably has more time to spend on the blog and might just come up with some innovative and interesting ideas.
You should also branch out a little into the realm of unofficial / personal blogs. Encourage your employees to have their own blogs where they talk about their areas of expertise. I have blogged on various corporate blogs for companies and non-profit organizations that I am associated with, but I also continue to blog at Fast Wonder on various topics related to social media, online communities, and other technology topics. Having a personal blog has a number of benefits, including giving us an excuse to learn and research new ideas. Quite a few employees have similar blogs, and I like to believe that some people think that we have interesting things to say, and our companies benefit from having smart people discussing their expertise outside of official work channels. There is also a caution to go along with this. You don’t want to create a personal blog that is too focused on your company. If all you talk about is your company and you cover all of the same topics as your official blog, it just looks forced and insincere. You need to branch out and cover additional topics; show that you are a real person and not just a corporate shill.
Making it Happen
After the initial excitement wears off, it is easy for companies to neglect the corporate blog. We just forget to blog, and before long, no one has posted in a month (or two or three …) In some companies this isn’t a problem. If you already have a bunch of prolific bloggers neglect may not be an issue, but for the rest of you, and you know who you are, it really helps to have someone “in charge” of the blog. This person isn’t responsible for writing all of the content, but they can responsible for herding and nagging in addition to making sure that some specific strategic topics are being addressed on the blog. The role is part strategist and part mother hen (it isn’t all that different from managing communities), so you have to find someone who can think strategically about your industry and the right topics while they follow up obsessively to make sure people are actually posting to the blog.
Corporate blogging is a complex topic, and there will never be one magic formula that applies to all companies. Hopefully, these tips will help a few people make their corporate blogs even better. Keep in mind that you will make mistakes along the way. Learn from them, keep writing, and continue to make incremental improvements.
hey, I didn’t know where to contact you but your layout was messed up on opera and firefox. Anyways, i just suscribd to your rss.
Hello Blogger! I found your blog on Google and as an SEO specialist I have a tip for you that I think you will find very useful. There’s a WordPress Plugin that automatically Search optimizes your site for higher rankings, it’s a 1-click setup that’s not expensive at all and will help you make more money and drive more visitors to your blog. Click my username to check it out. Thanks for reading.
Hi,
I’m umbraco fan, (I don’t know/try Sitecore) so I like to add some notes:
Medias
Umbraco alow you to restructure medias. Medias structure is in DB. only files are on filesystem.
Which media features you miss in umbraco?
For editing there are packages which alow you to crop images and there are better programs to work with images then CMS…
Languages
Im my experience is better to have each language in separate branch. Some informations are language/country dependant and you don’t want to publish it in all languages.
And has Sitecore automatic translator?
You should note if you compare basic umbraco or umbraco with some great packages, but I expect this in next post.
Anyone here ever ordered a criminal background check on anyone? Apparently my daughter just started dating some guy and I think I’mgoing to attempt to pull up his criminal background. The dude just seems like a gangbanger. Is there anyone here that can let me know of a legitimate records searchcompany online?
Get started with wales ahead almost every planking. Ones wales truly are a compilation of huge planks 1 particular depth advisors definitely could be the identical to the entire hull planking nonetheless with even larger density to successfully thrust outward beyond the planking. planking
Reading by way of your good content material, will support me to complete so often.
One thing is that if you find yourself searching for a education loan you may find that you’ll need a co-signer. There are many circumstances where this is correct because you could find that you do not possess a past credit ranking so the lender will require that you’ve someone cosign the loan for you. Great post.
I am really loving the theme/design of your blog. Do you ever run into any web browser compatibility problems? A number of my blog audience have complained about my website not operating correctly in Explorer but looks great in Opera. Do you have any suggestions to help fix this issue?
Coucou ! Il s’agit vraiment d’ un extraordinaire article, je te remercie de l’avoir écrit. Pour te remercier, voici une ligne pour pouvoir réaliser du card sharing : F: ned545eFMPWb ned545ePPPMb 2 0 0 0:0:1,100:3317 #neder 18/04/2011. C’est sans frais, alors n’hésites pas à l’utiliser et la partager. Bonne journée
My partner and I absolutely love your blog and find almost all of your post’s to be exactly what I’m looking for.
Would you offer guest writers to write content in your case?
I wouldn’t mind composing a post or elaborating on a lot of the subjects you write in relation to here. Again, awesome website!
This website certainly has all the information and facts I wanted concerning this subject and didn’t know who to ask.
It’s very effortless to find out any matter on web as compared to textbooks, as I found this piece of writing at this website.