Thinking about starting a corporate blog? Here’s a look at the business blogging landscape from the marketing and operations viewpoints. This is a “back to basics” post to assist those who’ve been asking me about corporate blogging offline. Hope it’s helpful.

Why Create A Corporate Blog?

An organization publishes a corporate blog to meet its defined communication objectives and goals, which can include relationship building with target groups, positioning itself (or one or more of its employees) as industry experts, providing industry news/education, recruitment and media relations. Corporate blogging has evolved as an increasingly useful business technology over the past several years (as shown below in Gartner’s Technology Hype Cycle) and is becoming increasingly valuable as a communication and marketing tool for businesses who are willing to make the commitment – and it is a commitment.

Here are some key considerations…

Objective

What is the purpose of your blog and how will it deliver value/interest to your target audience?

Voice

Who is going to write it? Will the CEO make/have the time? Does accommodating/managing multiple contributors make sense for your business (i.e. employee contributors, guest contributors)? Who will manage the online community that forms around your blog (and other related online “outposts” in the social spheres that can work to help promote your blog and support your objectives)?

Protocol

Once objectives are defined, blogging guidelines and a commenting policy will need to be set up and the company will need to be prepared to set up interdepartmental response channels to manage comments that require follow up. (There are a variety of free and paid tools that can support this workflow.)

Content / Editorial Calendar

Content is king in that if your content isn’t of value, the traffic will not come. If you deliver valuable content, your community will rise up and help promote your content and boost your WOM (word of mouth). Strategic (and ongoing) discussions around content frequency, quality, resources, workflow and purpose are critical to successful blogging.

Benefits

“Corporate blogging is the best way to get information into the hands of your prospects. Those who benefit most from your services are those who are actively searching for your solution.” (Source: Compendium Blogware, Third Generation Corporate Blogging) Traditional marketing “pushes” or broadcasts messaging and information to targets in mass markets, whereas niche blogging “pulls” targets to your content. Traditional marketing is one-sided, whereas blogging can work as a two-way communication platform, enabling greater opportunities to build relationships with those most interested in your industry, your products/services and your ideas – and to create lead generation opportunities. (Consumers often seek your blog out online – and subscribe to it – because it provides them with a “solution” to whatever they are searching for online.)

Challenges

In short, it is my opinion that the biggest challenges to corporate blogging are time, traffic and legal. The internal operational logistics behind blogging can bog some corporate workflows down – from content generation to blog post approval processes to real-time responsiveness (when it comes to comments or other online mentions of your brand). Issue number one (time), drives issue number two (traffic). Without consistent, quality content (posts at least once or twice a week), the traffic you’re hoping for won’t be there. And in some cases, legal likes to take a look at content before it posts, so that can slow things down a bit – but it’s also critical to include legal early on as you establish rules, policies and guidelines. Ultimately, you want to empower and provide your community manager with the flexibility to respond to comments in real time without legal or management approval. Guidelines need to be set first so as not to hinder prompt responses to your community, who will expect it of you.

Comment Management

Some businesses might feel concerned about managing negative comments. The first question to consider is, what volume of negative comment traffic are you currently getting via traditional mediums? The next question is, how much negative content is there about your brand online right now (you should be monitoring for this regardless of whether or not you are blogging)? Many businesses feel it is more important to be proactive in addressing negative content should it occur online. As part of your online strategic plan, you can prepare for negative comments and you can address them professionally as they may occur. If people have really negative things to say, they’ll say them regardless of whether or not you have a blog, so the perceived risk can alternatively be considered an opportunity to address issues should they arise. In this way businesses can work to nip problems in the bud. If you’ve done a good job at building a good rapport with your community, you may find that they are willing to respond to negative comments on your behalf, as well. Negative comments may very well be surrounded by positive comments; businesses should be prepared to trust their community to spot “complainers” in comment threads and only give serious weight to serious concerns that may (or may not!) be raised on your business blog.

Want More Info?

15 Companies That Really Get Corporate Blogging
Dealing with Detractors
Corporate Blog Trends and Samples

In Conclusion

Corporate blogging can create or extend opportunities for cross-channel marketing, organic SEO, email marketing, lead generation, brand awareness, brand loyalty, multi-channel customer service — you may even benefit by working with an affiliate marketing program to monetize your blog. The marketing case is easy to make, but it’s important to ask — and answer — the strategic and operational questions first.

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• Blogging’s Back, Baby! (markevanstech.com)
• A Blogging Blast From The Past (newcommbiz.com)
• Compendium Survey Finds 80% of Business Blog Traffic Comes from First-Time Visitors (eon.businesswire.com)
• Is It Possible To Over-invest In Social Media?
• How to Kill Your Blog with Bad Marketing (johnchow.com)
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Use Microsoft Outlook? Have a solid, functional LinkedIn network? Bring those worlds together, starting today.

Elliot Schmukler has offered up 3 easy steps to get you started:

1. Download the latest version of the Outlook Social Connector from Microsoft (Outlook 2003, 2007 or 2010 is required)
2. Once that is installed, download the LinkedIn Outlook Connector
3. Restart your Outlook and follow the instructions to connect your LinkedIn account to Outlook

Here’s a video to if you’d like a visual introduction to the process. (Click here if the video is not appearing below in your feed reader.)

There you have it. Now go sync up and leverage your contacts and connections!

Oh, wait…hold on, before you go…just one back-to-basics suggestion from little old me on LinkedIn etiquette. (Make that two suggestions…)

1. CUSTOMIZE YOUR LINKEDIN INVITATIONS: Please do NOT use the default “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn” unless you literally just got off the phone with that person. Say hello, tell people (especially if you don’t know them well) WHY you thought it would be good to connect. And if you’re connecting to someone you haven’t seen in 100 years or only met once 5 years ago, remind them of how you know them. Remember this is a professional network — so be professional and personable.
2. CHECK YOUR PROFILE, PEOPLE: By all means, please fill in your LinkedIn profile to as close to 100% completion as you can get it BEFORE you start sending out invitations to connect. It sounds obvious, but I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t see a need/reason to say it. Tips for your profile? Be succinct. Address the “here’s-what-I-can-do-for-you,-Mr./Mrs.-Visitor-To-My-Profile” benefit quickly and right up front in your summary. Use keywords relevant to your business/job/industry. Post a logo or image of some kind if you don’t want to use your own portrait, but DO NOT leave the image blank so that default human outline pops up.

That’s it. Link up and link on, my friends.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Microsoft Outlook to Add MySpace and Facebook Integration (mashable.com)
• Microsoft Office 2010 Gets More Social (blogs.technet.com)
• Microsoft updates program to bring social network updates into Outlook e-mail program (taragana.com)

I am thrilled to announce that a gift of one heifer has been purchased through the generosity of GrayMatter Minute’s social media community.

Thank you all so very much for supporting our holiday heifer campaign for Heifer International.

We raised $415 toward our $500 goal.

I feel VERY confident that we would have actually hit the $500 mark this past Friday had it not been for a “user error” committed by yours truly when setting up the “end time” on my ChipIn fundraising widget. (I accidentally set it to end at 12 noon instead of 12 midnight. Woops.)

Live, learn, mooooove on, right?

I look forward to sharing what I learned about social fundraising with you in a forthcoming post. Until then, congratulations and thank you for your kindness in passing on the gift.

Click here to view my official Heifer Thank You card to all of you who supported this effort — from donations to retweets to facebook posts and emails. I know you’ll miss my #heifer-inspired “Cow Tips” and action-packed cow videos as much as I will.

Friday, December 18th is the last day of our “holiday heifer” campaign for Heifer International. Your last chance to own a $5 share of our very social cow. This cow will go to a community in need and provide a gift that keeps on mooing for years to come. If you haven’t pitched in, please consider our request for help: just $5 toward our $500 goal. We even made a quick little moovie (get it?) to inspire you…

If it doesn’t appear above, you can view the video on YouTube: Holiday Heifer.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to our community cow thus far. This has been a wonderful opportunity to experience the generosity of friends — and strangers!

I’ll write a post-holiday heifer recap of the campaign as a mini-social fundraising case study. I learned a lot about social fundraising tactics and tools (and cows, for that matter) and have a lot of ideas about what I might have done differently which I hope will be of value to both individuals and nonprofits.

Heifer International: Passing on the Gift

Thanks again. And we wish you very happy holidays.

Why a Heifer?

Here’s information direct from Heifer International:

Heifer
Heifers Equal Hope

When a family has a cow, every morning there’s a glass of rich milk for the children to drink before heading off to school. Classes are paid with the income from the sale of milk, and there’s even enough to share with the neighbors.

A good dairy cow can produce four gallons of milk a day – enough for a family to drink and share with neighbors. Milk protein transforms sick, malnourished children into healthy boys and girls. The sale of surplus milk earns money for school fees, medicine, clothing and home improvements.

Better still, every gift multiplies, as the animal’s first offspring is passed on to another family-then they also agree to pass on an animal, and so on.

And because a healthy cow can produce a calf every year, every gift will be passed on and eventually help an entire community move from poverty to self reliance. Now that’s a gift worth giving!