Part 5: Blogging - Starting a blog baby, starting a blog

download Pdf

Blogs can be very successful marketing tools but in order to harness the power of the blogosphere for business purposes you need to be involved in it. They’re an excellent way to communicate with your staff, investors, members of your industry, journalists and prospective customers. That’s why it’s important that you get it right – if you’ve made the decision to start a blog make sure you’re committed to making it a success.

Selecting A Gatekeeper

Once you’ve committed to launching a corporate blog it’s a good idea to select one or two people to act as the gatekeepers / editors (just to be on the safe side).

A gatekeeper’s tasks include:

Going over blog posts and ensuring that they are all in line with the strategy goals
Ensuring the content of the blog is factually and grammatically correct
Monitoring comments and replies posted by readers
Discovering blog worthy topics and tasking them to the bloggers
Flagging posts and comments that may need involvement from managers and PR

What About The Bloggers?

From there you need to carefully select bloggers as it is the individuals and their distinct personalities that will ultimately determine the success of the blog – no one really wants to read endless reams of coma-inducing copy so choosing the right bloggers is a crucial step in the journey to success.

So look out for the following characteristics when choosing your bloggers: the ability to listen to an audience, passion for the topic, the ability to communicate their personality online (not everyone can actually do this), perseverance and commitment, good writing skills and those who actually have the time to blog regularly.

Generally the tasks that a blogger undertakes include:

Writing posts
Replying to comments from readers
Monitoring other blogs within the industry
Keeping up to date with the latest industry news
Building relationships with other bloggers in the community
Commenting on other blogs

Now On To The Content

For corporate blogs it’s important that some guidelines are established before unleashing your bloggers. Transparency and honesty are important but if there are “no go” areas they need to be clearly defined. While certain topics can be restricted, ultimately the bloggers should be granted the freedom to express both negative and positive points of view about the approved topics. Ultimately the content always depends on the industry. The goal with content is to ensure that the blog is personal, informative and entertaining while ensuring there are rules against material that is obscene, defamatory, profane or hateful.

Your Content Should Be:

Industry relevant
Appealing to your target market
Transparent and honest
Personal and entertaining
Related to what’s going on in the blogosphere – it’s vital to be listening to what’s going on out there – you don’t want to miss the boat
General content rules set need to be adhered to. So be honest and transparent but if there’s a no go area – stay away from it

A Look At Frequency

It is important that the blog is updated often - once a day (including weekends) is optimal to keep the content fresh. Posting irregularly may stop visitors from coming back as once they have visited the site one too many times without it being updated they may never return. On the other hand if it is updated too often (more than once a day) it may get a tad overwhelming for your readers. It’s a good idea to try and include images, videos and audio bits every now and again as readers enjoy a bit of diversity.

Podcasting and videocasting are excellent ways to keep readers interested. Consider introducing these once you have got the hang of blogging every day and are looking to spice things up a bit.

Making It Pretty

Take the extra time to make your posts “pretty”. Long reams of text are overwhelming. Use bullets, bolding, different length paragraphs. Be sure to vary the length of your posts each day as well. Before publishing a post make sure that you recheck the spelling and grammar and make sure all the links in your post work – some smart arse is bound to leave a scathing comment.

The Comment Policy

To allow open comments or not to allow open comments – that is the question.
This always seems to be a tricky one for corporates and even individual bloggers. At Quirk we believe that comments should be left un-moderated whenever possible. It is far better to reply to a bad comment and set the record straight as opposed to preventing that individual from airing their views, as they will find some open forum to do so anyway.

If it’s not the actual content of the comment but the spam element that you’re worried about you could always add a CAPTCHA or another anti spam method.

It is imperative that you are checking the comments made on your posts and responding appropriately. Remember that if a negative comment is made a quick and rational response will go a long way in order to resolve the problem. Also – read what the bloggers who are commenting on your posts and blogging in the same industry as you are writing about – remember it’s all about fostering a relationship and integrating yourself. Also bloggers tend to be slightly egocentric and they’ll definitely want to see who their readers are – which will encourage them to check out your blog from the link you leave in the comment on theirs.

The Essential Blog Features

Comment Facility
RSS and RSS to email - have feeds set up for posts / comments and individual authors
Interlinking between your posts is important – try and do this as often as you can
Trackbacks
About Us Section (all the personas will be found here) as well as a general introduction
Contact info needs to be displayed prominently – there is nothing more irritating than having to look for this info – chances are if they don’t see it straight away, they’re not going to bother
An internal search function
Social bookmarking chicklets