Blogging + How To = Rules to make it works and more
Blogging is still in its amateur stage but now we’ve got some interesting feedbacks and case studies we can analyze to know more on what’s to do or not. To get reviews of some interesting corporate US blogs, go on Viral Garden blog to read “The Company blog checkup top 10“. There you can have reviews of 21 corporate blogs. To these 21 reviews, we can add many other ones, like the ones of Twitter, Google, Facebook, Boeing, Delta, StonyField farms blog, Johnson & Johnson BTW (By the Way), Kodak, Accenture blogs, Microsoft blog, and many products or service blogs. Which can then help to build 10 recommendations/ rules to follow for company blogging.
10 rules we can extract from the different company blogging experiences:
- #1: show passion and interest
- #2: Share experiences
- #3: Share information
- #4: Be trustful
- #5: Bring people closer to your brand
- #6: Highlight your best community members
- #7: Show your compay culture and mindset
- #8: Keep the “insider style”
- #9: Be consistent and engage people
- #10 : Connect it to your business
Some company blogs are filled with corporate information, only sending information. It’s a use they can do of a blog but there’s a slight difference with traditional blogging, those company leveraging the content platform for its ease to generate content more than for its ability to initiate a conversation. That’s an interesting use, meaning companies have direct use of their platform giving more reactivity to them for announcements (useful for crisis management). But it’s not fully blogging since not leveraging all the opportunities blog format offers. That remembers me one post R. Scoble did write back in 2003 entitled “Corporate Weblog Manifesto” (kind of amazing to read it again, basics to blogging are already inside his post).
Fully leveraged blog format can be seen with vertical media companies such as Weblogs, inc (that runs Engaget, TUAW, TV Squad) or Gawker Media (Gizmodo, Life Hacker, Gawker, ValleyWag), using blogs to start conversations, engage people with an open discussion, though the blog format doesn’t help that much conversation (reason why I say blogging is just a conversation starter). When starting a blog, think about how you would show your company culture, mindset, activity, core business, and why it’s worth taking time reading your company/ product/ service blog. And above all, never forget to set objectives and connect your blog with your business (like inviting people to continue the conversation on a dedicated platform, threshold of your CRM program or customer care service) to get notice of the use and ROI of your blog (unless you don’t want to know if that helps you running your business).
I would come to each item in following posts.
More info:
- The NewPR.com corporate blog list
- Top 15 corporate blogs by Marketing Nirvana
Photo Credit: Jens Gyldenkærne Clausen
Engaging with your Community for Dummies = Share passion (1/10) - Fast.Fwd.Innov@tion | August 14th, 2008 at 11:56 pm #
[...] I was reviewing the post “Blogging + How To = Rules to make it works and more” where are listed 10 rules to follow to get started with blogging, I just feel like those [...]