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Corporate Blogging - Get Serious
Social media initiatives such as blogging are long-term strategies that function cumulatively, gradually building the author’s (and/or firm’s) reputation via quality interactions and boosting search engine rankings via organic links that are far more valuable than any paid links. Corporate blogs, rather than promoting products or rehashing the latest sales pitch, should aim to make serious, constructive contributions to the body of industry knowledge online. They should also encourage and facilitate reader participation via constructive comments, meaningful links and trackbacks, social bookmarks, collaborative tags and so on.
However, aside from opinion blog postings (that most corporate blogs do generate in abundance), there’s a set of other, less well-known blog tactics that contribute to the success of a corporate blog … tactics that encourage two-sided communication by demonstrating the ability to both listen to and talk through the company’s blog:
- Digest-style posts: These posts provide a valuable service to readers by giving them a snapshot of a particular space and supplying links to information they might be interested in. By pointing readers to smart stimulating content, their enjoyment of it is transferable to the site that sent them to it, building goodwill that results in more bookmarks and incoming links.
- News aggregation posts: Given the plethora of industry news in the technology space, these posts serve as a guide to the latest happenings. They are a useful service for technologists - even if they’re competitors - and will raise the site’s online profile over time.
- Dialogue contributions: These are essay-style posts about implementing a product, a new industry report or trend, or a long response to a thought-provoking post on another blog. They are critical for adding to the conversation in the blogosphere. These posts are often written by subject matter experts and hit on the industry’s most relevant topics.
- Comments / questions: Social media is a two-way street and a key element here is strong contributions to well chosen, relevant blogs. These are not leading questions or comments written to target search engine keywords. Rather, they are questions or comments of general interest and engagement to provide feedback that is of high value to other authors in the space.
- Blogrolls: A strong blogroll (list of favorite and relevant blogs) serves as a valuable information referral service. Therefore, careful consideration should be applied when building a corporate blogroll. In the technology space, blogrolls usually include a mix of technology, industry and educational (how-to) blogs.
Firms using blogging in their marketing arsenal need to understand the opportunities – and potential pitfalls – of welcoming interaction with readers. Web 2.0 isn’t simply tossing your opinion or casual posts into the blogosphere. Rather, social media requires careful consideration, planning and execution if these strategies are to successfully enhance more traditional – and proven – marketing initiatives.
