Corporate Blogging Best Practices

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Steve Rubel reports form the Word of Mouth Marketing conference on David Binkowski’s advice to corporate bloggers. According to Rubel, corporate bloggers should:

– maintain a consistent tone
– have strong and newsworthy content
– disclose intentions and sources
– post frequent updates
– deal with comments
– keep innovating

That’s a good start. Other points that I suggest prospective or new corporate bloggers should keep in mind:

  • Study the blogosphere to determine if it is right for your company. Don’t get in today if you aren’t ready or if you don’t see the benefits. But keep paying attention. Things are changing fast. More and more people are finding their voice in the blogosphere. Your customers, your target audience or your competitors are only one click of the Publish button away from having an impact on you.
  • Ensure that your blog has a clear, single purpose. Remember, blogs are a discussion of current events and current thinking. They differ in this from the traditional web, which represents an encyclodedia. Let your corporate website catalogue all of the information you want to present. Focus your blog on the things with which you are personal engaged.
  • Your blog should be part of a grassroots strategy. Don’t let it stand alone. Once you have engaged in a dialogue with your audience, you should leverage this interest in as many ways as you can to build a lasting relationship.
  • Establish and maintain a regular tempo of postings. That doesn’t mean that you must post every day. But maintain a minimum period of postings to establish and then meet your audience’s expectations.
  • Bloggers need: Passion and a Voice. A blogger must have something to say, a willingness to write it, and the perseverance to keep at it.
  • Blogs will be credible only if the voice is truly the voice of the author. Blogs are not corporate speeches. It’s fine to ask people to edit and comment on a draft posting before it is published. However, if the blogger is not really originating his/her own material, find another blogger.
  • Blogging does not need to start from the top. You can start with someone who has a point of view and expertise in an issue or area related to your organization or business (e.g. Customer service, your industry, product design).
  • Write in an informal, chatty style. Avoid “corporate speak.”
  • Make each blog posting short in order to increase the likelihood that people will read it.
  • Define who owns the blog. If it is a corporate blog, postings can be screened and approved by management. If it is a personal blog, provide some blogging guidelines regarding the boundaries of acceptability.
  • Keep corporate blogging guidelines to a minimum. Count on common sense.
  • Finally, learn by doing.

    • What do you think? Are there points I’ve missed? Have you found other useful guidelines for prospective and new corporate bloggers?

    Another CEO uses his blog to level the playing field with a reporter

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    Mathew Ingram has written in today’s Globe and Mail about Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com, using his blog for an online tussle with Business Week reporter, Tim Mullaney. Ingram concludes:

    “… the ability to post your comments on a story to your blog, as Mr. Cuban did, or to post the interview and your responses even before the article runs, as Mr. Byrne did, is a pretty powerful tool. And they are not unique: as journalist and blogger Dan Gillmor notes, the U.S. Defence Department has been posting full transcripts of its interviews with journalists for a while now. As Mr. Gillmor notes on his Citizens’ Media blog, journalists are effectively having “transparency imposed on them” by the Internet.”

    Sanity Check has published the complete exchange between Byrne and Mullaney.

    Who's first to embrace social media?

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    In Across the Sound New Marketing Podcast #13 (minute 28), Steve Rubel talked about the Going the Distance discussion on the NewPR/Wiki regarding the adoption rate of social media. Rubel reported that the common thread is that “it’s going slowly. It’s account by account, team by team … and the best way to get folks involved is by throwing them into the pool.”

    Our experience at Thornley Fallis with social media is similar – with one very interesting twist.

    For the last year, we’ve been building our social media pool and inviting all of our team to test the water. We launched our team Wiki approximately a year ago in December 2004. Since then, we’ve moved forward to introduce an internal blog and to encourage people to author their own blogs. We’ve recently revamped our Wiki and phased out our traditional webmaster-controlled intranet to entice our people to assume responsibility for authorship of our common workspace.

    Like many others, we have found that adoption has been slow.

    But here’s the twist.

    The first to test and then to embrace social media have not been the youngest people on our team. They have not been the most computer-oriented.

    In fact, our most senior people have been the first to experiment with and adopt social media. They have seized on our internal blog as a means of creating between people in offices in different cities a conversation that has the same immediacy as the conversations they engage in with the people in their own office.

    We’ve had a similar experience with our Wiki. The most aggressive user has been one of our Vice Presidents who has begun using the wiki to manage one of our largest client relationships – posting work, deadlines and calling on the team to share information in a way that the whole team can easily see it and update it

    So, right now we have the interesting experience of having people at the level of CEO, President and Vice President using our blogs and our Wiki while our younger staff mostly look on.

    So, we’re off to a gradual start, which has required patience and a willingness to backtrack and try new approaches. And I believe that the early participation of mostly senior people is actually a good thing because the whole team can see that the folks who run the company really are “walking the talk.”

    Hopefully, the next stage will see the more junior folks jump in to the pool. We’re doing our best to convince them that the water’s warm.

    The Wiki Learning Curve (2)

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    My company has replaced our Intranet with a Wiki. In a previous post, I wrote that the Wiki Learning Curve – the need for users raised on MS Word to adopt a new mindset suited to the Wiki interface – is impeding use of our Wiki by our team.

    We’ve taken two measures which we hope will help users make the transition to the new model of collaborative software.

  • First, we’ve rearranged the main page of our wiki to include a traditional hierarchical table of contents to enable new users to easily see what’s already posted.
  • Second, we’ve added custom FAQs to the existing Help files. These FAQs address the most basic questions about adding content, editing existing pages and formatting in a way that should enable each user to quickly and easily make the most common changes. Links are provided at the bottom of each FAQ to the Wikipedia help file for that topic. In effect these FAQs are like trainer wheels for the Wiki.

    Simple measures that we hope will increase the use of our Wiki by our team. We’ll be listening closely to our user feedback and watching usage patterns in the coming weeks to see if these measures prove to be what is really required.

    And, we’ll also be looking forward to the WYSIWYG editor which I understand will soon be added to MediaWiki, the software we use for our Wiki.

    • The Wiki Learning Curve

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    Shel Holtz points to a Business Week article, E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago. Business Week says that

    “…it’s easy-to-use and practically free wikis that proponents say offer the promise of collaboration beyond e-mail, even though big editing kinks remain and other quirks and security flaws are sure to surface. Internet research firm Gartner Group predicts that wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009.”

    My company shares the belief that Wikis are the way of the future. In fact, we’ve been experimenting with a Wiki to replace our traditional Intranet site with a fully multi-authored, collaborative space.

    What we are finding is that authoring on the Wiki requires users to adopt a new mindset that does not come naturally to a generation raised on MS Word. At this time, the Wiki Learning Curve is limiting adoption of the Wiki by many of our users. They are telling us that they require Help files geared to the nontechnical user and a more intuitive editing interface.

    We’ll keep working on this. But I think that we are like most organizations in only having started up the learning curve.

    Why I am Blogging

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    Through this blog, I hope to have a voice in the discussion surrounding new developments in public relations, communications and marketing.

    At my firm, we encourage people to develop to their maximum potential.

    Thought leadership is an important goal for all professionals. With this blog, I hope to stimulate others to think about these issues and advance their own thinking.

    Comments are an important means of contributing to the discussion. I encourage any who read this blog to offer their comments on my entries.