Developing the right team is an important step in launching a corporate blog (Photo by alemjusic at stock.xchng - http://www.sxc.hu/photo/693414)
A lot of what I write about here applies to individuals — individual blogs, personal branding and personal use of social media. But businesses, large and small, can also use blogs and social media to strengthen their brand, reach new customers and grow sales. And some kind of corporate or organizational blog is often an important part of the social media strategy.
So, let me suggest a few tips on ways to ensure your corporate blog is effective.
1. Get buy-in.
Make sure your executive leadership, including the corporate counsel and the CFO’s office. At large companies this process could require months. Nonetheless, getting buy-in on the benefits of having a corporate blog (and the risks, and a plan to manage the risks) is a lot easier to get ahead of the time then to ask for later.
Chances are blogging is actually not the riskiest thing your company does — far from it. But to many senior executives it may sound risky, so educating them is important.
2. Develop a strategy.
Identify your audience (investors, employees, current customers, potential customers or maybe all of these?) and get clear about what the goal of the blog is. What are you trying to achieve by having a corporate blog? Are you trying to drive leads to sales? Increase awareness? Foster conversation with key influencers (such as analysts and journalists)? Figure that out.
While you’re at it, develop some metrics to go along with your goals. Is it merely traffic, the level of interaction, or the profit from new customers?
3. Decide on the team.
Having a blog team makes it much more likely that your organizational blog will keep going, even during times when other stuff crops up and threatens to take your focus away from your blog (I speak from experience on this). Choose team members with the right skills, an interest in blogging and social media, and the ability to get the job done. Your team might include an editor/team leader, one or two contributing writers, someone from IT to help with the technical side of things and a designer to ensure the blog looks good.
4. Establish an approval process.
The quickest way to slow down posting on a blog is to have an unclear approval process. Or worse yet, no approval process at all. The first time some dumb error slips through the blog will also be the time when the CEO just happens to be reading it. You want an approval process — a system — in place, or else you run the risk of having one imposed on you.
Who on the team writes the draft of a blog post? Who edits it? Does anybody outside the blog team need to review it? If so, who sends it to that person? Do outside reviewers understand your blog deadlines?
5. Brainstorm blog post ideas.
Get your team, get your plan and go hole up in a conference room. Then come up with lots and lots of ideas for blog posts. If you want to prime the pump for this exercise, consider my post yesterday on 10 ways to generate ideas for blog posts.
You may only have to do this once, because often the act of writing a blog post results in more ideas for future posts. However, if you find your bank of blog post ideas getting a little thin, you may want to schedule a new brainstorming session periodically. Also consider the value of bringing others into these sessions — other employees, business partners and vendors, and perhaps even members of your target audience (for example, potential customers).
Once you’ve done your brainstorming session you’ll probably need to go back and winnow the list down, picking out the best, strongest ideas for blog posts. But brainstorm first; it’s easier to pull out strong ideas from a really long list produced by a good brainstorming session.
6. Create an editorial calendar.
Once you have a bunch of blog post topics, schedule them and assign them to members of your team (including yourself). Make sure everyone understands who’s writing what, who’s editing what, and when blog posts are scheduled to be published. Having a clear schedule with blog posts already plugged in ensures that you won’t be scrambling around for a post when you realize the entire blog team is going on vacation at the same time.
It’s OK to add things to the editorial calendar at the last minute, based on new announcements or developments in your company’s business. But in case you don’t have news to fuel the blog, an editorial calendar will help you keep it on track.
7. Train people on the software.
Whatever blogging software you use (I recommend WordPress, but Movable Type is also an option, and there are a host of other robust content management systems available), train your team on it. If there’s only one person on the team who knows how to actually post content, then you’re blog is going to grind to a halt whenever that person is away.
At their heart, blogs and social media are all about empowering people. So empower your team, even the blog virgins who have never used blogging software below and need some training.
8. Decide on a comments policy.
Decide on how you’ll handle comments. And in particular, decide on how you’ll handle negative comments. If your blog is at all successful, you will get negative comments. So will you publish those? If you publish them, will you respond to them? This is the hardest part for most traditional companies to figure out. Businesses are usually just not comfortable with the idea of responding to negative comments in a forum that’s visible to everyone.
But, not allowing negative comments may make your blog appear less transparent and less credible. And not responding to negative comments may allow false perceptions to take hold in your audience. Nonetheless, this is tricky for businesses. As I said in step No. 1, getting buy-in from senior executives is the most important part of this process.
There’s a lot more corporate bloggers can and should do, of course. But if you’re just launching a blog, going through these steps will give you a strong foundation for a successful blog. What are your tips for launching a corporate blog? Please share them in the comments below.
In no particular order, I'm a writer, MBA, ex-journalist, blogger, geek, strategic communications pro, father, struggling novelist and more. Want to connect?
In no particular order, I'm a writer, MBA, ex-journalist, blogger, geek, strategic communications pro, father, struggling novelist and more. Want to connect?
Eight steps to launching a corporate blog
by Mark Tosczak on January 27, 2010 · 0 comments
in Blogging,Content marketing,Marketing & public relations,Popular,Social media
Developing the right team is an important step in launching a corporate blog (Photo by alemjusic at stock.xchng - http://www.sxc.hu/photo/693414)
A lot of what I write about here applies to individuals — individual blogs, personal branding and personal use of social media. But businesses, large and small, can also use blogs and social media to strengthen their brand, reach new customers and grow sales. And some kind of corporate or organizational blog is often an important part of the social media strategy.
So, let me suggest a few tips on ways to ensure your corporate blog is effective.
1. Get buy-in.
Make sure your executive leadership, including the corporate counsel and the CFO’s office. At large companies this process could require months. Nonetheless, getting buy-in on the benefits of having a corporate blog (and the risks, and a plan to manage the risks) is a lot easier to get ahead of the time then to ask for later.
Chances are blogging is actually not the riskiest thing your company does — far from it. But to many senior executives it may sound risky, so educating them is important.
2. Develop a strategy.
Identify your audience (investors, employees, current customers, potential customers or maybe all of these?) and get clear about what the goal of the blog is. What are you trying to achieve by having a corporate blog? Are you trying to drive leads to sales? Increase awareness? Foster conversation with key influencers (such as analysts and journalists)? Figure that out.
While you’re at it, develop some metrics to go along with your goals. Is it merely traffic, the level of interaction, or the profit from new customers?
3. Decide on the team.
Having a blog team makes it much more likely that your organizational blog will keep going, even during times when other stuff crops up and threatens to take your focus away from your blog (I speak from experience on this). Choose team members with the right skills, an interest in blogging and social media, and the ability to get the job done. Your team might include an editor/team leader, one or two contributing writers, someone from IT to help with the technical side of things and a designer to ensure the blog looks good.
4. Establish an approval process.
The quickest way to slow down posting on a blog is to have an unclear approval process. Or worse yet, no approval process at all. The first time some dumb error slips through the blog will also be the time when the CEO just happens to be reading it. You want an approval process — a system — in place, or else you run the risk of having one imposed on you.
Who on the team writes the draft of a blog post? Who edits it? Does anybody outside the blog team need to review it? If so, who sends it to that person? Do outside reviewers understand your blog deadlines?
5. Brainstorm blog post ideas.
Get your team, get your plan and go hole up in a conference room. Then come up with lots and lots of ideas for blog posts. If you want to prime the pump for this exercise, consider my post yesterday on 10 ways to generate ideas for blog posts.
You may only have to do this once, because often the act of writing a blog post results in more ideas for future posts. However, if you find your bank of blog post ideas getting a little thin, you may want to schedule a new brainstorming session periodically. Also consider the value of bringing others into these sessions — other employees, business partners and vendors, and perhaps even members of your target audience (for example, potential customers).
Once you’ve done your brainstorming session you’ll probably need to go back and winnow the list down, picking out the best, strongest ideas for blog posts. But brainstorm first; it’s easier to pull out strong ideas from a really long list produced by a good brainstorming session.
6. Create an editorial calendar.
Once you have a bunch of blog post topics, schedule them and assign them to members of your team (including yourself). Make sure everyone understands who’s writing what, who’s editing what, and when blog posts are scheduled to be published. Having a clear schedule with blog posts already plugged in ensures that you won’t be scrambling around for a post when you realize the entire blog team is going on vacation at the same time.
It’s OK to add things to the editorial calendar at the last minute, based on new announcements or developments in your company’s business. But in case you don’t have news to fuel the blog, an editorial calendar will help you keep it on track.
7. Train people on the software.
Whatever blogging software you use (I recommend WordPress, but Movable Type is also an option, and there are a host of other robust content management systems available), train your team on it. If there’s only one person on the team who knows how to actually post content, then you’re blog is going to grind to a halt whenever that person is away.
At their heart, blogs and social media are all about empowering people. So empower your team, even the blog virgins who have never used blogging software below and need some training.
8. Decide on a comments policy.
Decide on how you’ll handle comments. And in particular, decide on how you’ll handle negative comments. If your blog is at all successful, you will get negative comments. So will you publish those? If you publish them, will you respond to them? This is the hardest part for most traditional companies to figure out. Businesses are usually just not comfortable with the idea of responding to negative comments in a forum that’s visible to everyone.
But, not allowing negative comments may make your blog appear less transparent and less credible. And not responding to negative comments may allow false perceptions to take hold in your audience. Nonetheless, this is tricky for businesses. As I said in step No. 1, getting buy-in from senior executives is the most important part of this process.
There’s a lot more corporate bloggers can and should do, of course. But if you’re just launching a blog, going through these steps will give you a strong foundation for a successful blog. What are your tips for launching a corporate blog? Please share them in the comments below.
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Tagged as: comment policy, corporate blogging