How to Avoid Signing Your Own Corporate Blog’s Death Warrant
By Scott Tieman, Senior Marketing Strategist
Not long ago, seemingly every company rushed into the blogosphere with its home grown corporate blog. The thinking was the company could use this platform as a marketing megaphone to amplify the buzz around its latest products, events, and more. Companies soon realized that the excitement of hosting a blog soon died off and their blogs floundered, never to be touched again. At Red Bricks Media, we often encourage our clients to make the plunge, but not before a serious gut check. Many articles focus on the philosophy of blogging; we’re going to discuss the practicality and logistics of blog ownership, an oft overlooked topic.
Corporate blogs that fail are either conceived from the top down or bottom up, but not both at the same time. They need support from both ends to flourish.
Let’s examine top down first.
Corporate blogs can be excellent marketing tools when they’re aligned with the strategic marketing objectives of the company. Translation: what do I hope to accomplish with my corporate blog? Typically, the response is less than satisfying, something like “engender loyalty” or “proactively offset negative marketplace sentiment” or “inform our customers of new product releases or enhanced feature sets.” These are diffuse goals that are difficult to measure. How will you know if your campaign is succeeding without actionable measurement?
Next, companies need to make an important commitment to the employees who contribute to their corporate blogs. First, contributors shouldn’t feel like blogging is a side gig to be done when all other tasks are complete. On the contrary, you should write this activity into your employees’ job description. This will ensure that the contributors don’t feel like they need to always cut into their free time to write. Also, you should consider offering an attainable performance bonus for consistent, high quality contributions to the corporate blog. This will ensure a high level of contribution even during the times when the hours are demanding at the company.
Finally, a company should embrace the idea that their corporate bloggers are a precious, scarce resource. They will be the company champions and the company’s face to the rest of the world. As such, you should commit to not only promoting the corporate blog to increase audience size, but also recognition for the contributors. Making someone an anonymous contributor will most likely decrease that person’s sense of responsibility to the task.
Now let’s examine bottom up.
Corporate blogs require consistently active, passionate authors. When identifying employees to take on this new role, you should always start with hand-raisers. These are the employees most likely to embrace this new role as contributor. However, they shouldn’t stop there. We all know people that have great intentions when starting a new project, but quickly grow bored over the monotonous routine of completing the project. Corporate blogs have indefinite timelines, so it’s important to make this selection carefully. We typically recommend identifying multiple contributors for the same blog. That way, you can ensure that there will be some coverage when the initial excitement wanes and people get inevitably swamped with work.
Also, look for people that have something fresh to say. There are millions of blogs out there and probably more than you know that cover your own company. You should read some of them first and figure out what will differentiate what the company has to say from what has already been said. If the corporate blog is same old, same old, someone else will probably say it better than your company.
Finally, nothing saps the passion out of contributors more than muting their voice with unnecessary corporate blogging “guidelines.” Blogs are social media. The best blogs enable an authentic dialog between authors and their audience. Marketers LOVE control, but this is the wrong place for too much of it. Two thoughts come to mind. First, make sure to enable comments on blogs. Dialogs are inherently two-way communication. If you want a monologue, post another press release. Second, limit the number of bureaucratic filtering layers. Let the true voice of the author ring through. Anecdotally, I worked at Yahoo! two years ago. Before any article got posted to their corporate blog, two managers and the legal team needed to give their stamp of approval. The result was that all articles sounded the same, corporate, and boring. The author’s true voice had been stripped out. Don’t let this happen to you.
Corporate blogs fail for a host of reasons. Before starting a corporate blog, perform a serious gut check. If not, you’ll sign the death warrant on your own corporate blog before it’s ever launched.
This article is cross-posted from Scott’s blog.