Advice for the Aspiring Corporate Blogger
Business owners just aren’t known to spill their guts voluntarily. But many take part in a revealing online activity once dominated by technology geeks and teenagers. Executives are blogging. Take Dell’s Direct2Dell blog, for example.
Blogs (also known by their full moniker, Weblogs) are essentially Web pages on which an author posts diary-like entries, often commenting on other stories or other blogs while providing links to those sites.
For companies, blogs provide an inexpensive medium to talk informally with customers. In our second article in a series about Web 2.0, we uncover tips for using blogs to help nurture customer relationships. Here’s our advice for the aspiring corporate blogger.
Know your company.
Before diving headfirst into the blogosphere, ask yourself is whether your company should even blog at all. Naturally, there are some corporate cultures where blogging is not welcome. In our experience, blogging thrives best in businesses that truly trust their employees and won’t require their blog entries to filter through a committee of editors.
If your company culture supports blogging, then determine who’s the best person to write your blog. Choose someone who writes well, with a conversational, authentic, individual and confident tone. This person may or may not be your CEO.
Whoever does end up writing the blog shouldn’t be anonymous or hidden behind some cutesy corporate character. For example, if you blogged for J.B. Hunt, don’t be “The Truck Guy.” Sure, you can (and should) title your blog, but use your real name as the author. People write blogs, after all. Not mascots.
Know your audience.
Find something to talk about that your audience is interested in. Dig deep and think hard about this one. If you can’t find something relevant to your business to blog passionately about, your blog will be a transparent corporate PR vehicle. For technology companies like us, that’s easy to avoid – we’ve got a few passionate developers blogging about programming and project-related issues. But what if you make, say, wallpaper, or sell large hauling equipment?
Simple. Just learn what your customers care about and figure out a way to participate in that conversation. Our client Mike Wright, owner of Arkansas Urban Wildlife, writes a blog “Mike’s World” in which he talks about keeping wildlife from entering your home – a hot topic for the customers of his wild animal removal services. Again, find an intersection between what you want to write about and what your audience cares about.
Engage your audience.
Blogs are a conversation. As such, people can publish their comments about your blog for the world to see. Just as you work to engage the people you speak with face-to-face, write blogs to elicit responses from your readers online. Ask questions. Keep the conversation going. Corporate blogs with commenting readers are essentially a free focus group, so it is to your advantage to absorb what your readers have to say. Especially if you disagree with their opinion.
That’s hard to swallow, but just think – how do you build the most trust in relationships? By being open, authentic, and transparent. Research shows that the highest degree of trust comes from the people customers perceive as “like them,” and a savvy marketer will allow comments to appear from peers, customers and the market. These will not always be glowing product or service reviews. But the goal is to take that feedback and demonstrate in public how you will improve your offerings.
Of course you can always moderate (see and approve comments before they are posted to your site) and delete comments, but it’s generally a good idea to post all comments if you want people to feel free to continue posting.
Stay up-to-date.
Update your blog often. We recommend posting one entry each week at a bare minimum. Daily entries are preferred, no matter how brief. The last thing you want is for a customer to see a blog that hasn’t been updated in three months and wonder if anyone’s home. Updating often also gives you a chance to build a loyal readership that returns to your Web site again and again. Don’t risk alienating your readers or letting them down by posting entries more than a week apart.
Get started today.
Ready to start reaching your customers through a company blog? Call us today. We offer blogs as add-in components to our proprietary content managment system, Newswyre. We’d love to work with you to create a new, blog-enabled Newswyre Web site from the ground up, or simply add blogging capabilities to your existing Newswyre site.
