Scenario: Translucent, Inc. had an image problem. They wanted their customers to understand what they stood for, but were unable to communicate their values effectively. At one point a major glitch occurred in their best selling product and it took months for the PR manager to set things straight.
Business Blogging
The Corporate Blogging Genome
There have been a number of notable articles in recent years about corporate blogging, but most of them suffer from the same problem that blogging has always had: it’s different to help a large group of people understand concepts that are fuzzy and inconsistent. The business community generally accepts that corporate blogging is here to stay, but what they mean by “corporate blogging” can differ wildly from one individual to another.
While I feel that this situation is normal (and to some extent, probably desirable), I thought it might be interesting to try to impose some clarity onto the situation, based on my understanding of corporate blogging as I’ve watched it evolve in the past several years. With that in mind, I present the Corporate Blogging Genome, a simple way to classify and identify corporate blogs by their nature and type.
(Please don’t take this too seriously — this is definitely a mental exercise more than a proposed scheme for pigeonholing the varied and complicated world of corporate blogging!)
How It Works
There are four basic parameters (Audience, Emphasis, Control, and Formality), each of which has two possible options (e.g., a corporate blog’s target audience can be Internal or External).
Once you’ve identified where your corporate blog falls within each of those four parameters, you’ll take the first letter of each of your choices and string them together into a single four-letter code.
That code is your Corporate Blogging Genome. It won’t directly boost sales or seal your exist strategy, but it will help you understand your blog and focus your efforts accordingly, which can have great indirect benefits on your business.
On to the details!
Audience: Employees or Public?
The most important question (and unfortunately one of the least asked) is “Who is the blog for?”
- Employees: Knowledge blogs, project blogs, internal goof-off blogs, etc., all fall into this category.
- Public: Primarily oriented toward expressing something within the company (announcements, ideas, opinions, etc.) to the outside world.
Control: Open or Closed?
Companies can get understandably nervous about spilling their guts online, so some blogs are definitely more tightly controlled than others.
- Open: Open blogs can generally be edited by a large group of people (sometimes the entire staff), giving everyone the ability to share their ideas.
- Closed: Closed blogs are limited to a very small group or a single individual, typically the CEO or a marketing/PR person. (This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and can often be an appropriate choice for a company.)
Emphasis: Random or Targeted?
Blogs can cover almost any subject imaginable, so providing some clear (or intentionally unclear!) direction is essential for keeping things on the right track.
- Random: Free-form blog that can cover any subject under the sun: movies, politics, funny videos, etc.
- Targeted: These blogs focus on specific subjects, typically related to the company (e.g., industry articles) or a specific context within the company (e.g., a particular project)
Formality: Formal or Casual?
Just because it has a goofy name like “blog” doesn’t mean it has to be sloppy and haphazard! In recent years, blogs have become a signficant source of high-quality information and resources, in part because many of them have begun to regard themselves more formally, taking the time to perform research and encourage high-quality writing.
- Formal: Features clear, well-written, and generally fact-oriented articles.
- Casual: Characterized by brief, loosely-written, and often opinionated posts.
So, what are you?
At Forty, our blog has evolved over the years, but is currently optimized as a POTF:
- Public: It’s geared toward business owners, rather than for our internal staff.
- Open: All employees are able to post articles to it.
- Targeted: We’ve removed all articles not related to issues faced by business owners, and that’s what we’ll be writing about in the future.
- Formal: We put a lot of time and effort into our articles, rather than just dashing them off.
(That certainly doesn’t mean that POTF is any kind of ideal — it’s just what we happen to do.)
How would you categorize your company’s blog?
Top 10 Business Blogging Tips
Want to get your business blog in gear? Here are 10 (plus 1 bonus!) battle-tested tips that you can start implementing today:
- Host on your own domain: One of the biggest mistakes made by business bloggers is hosting on a third-party domain, such as “typepad.com” or “blogspot.com”. It can be a great way to get up and running with minimal technical fuss, but in the long run it will come back to bite you. Once you’ve built an audience, search engine value, etc., you’re tied to that domain. Get off on the right foot, and make sure you’re using your own domain name from the beginning.
- Get a real design: Marketing is ultimately about differentiation, and you’ll have a hard time standing out when your business blog looks just like a hundred others. Skip the free themes, and put some money toward hiring hiring a blog design company to do the job right. Never underestimate the effectiveness of powerful design.
- Integrate the blog with your business site: The classic business blogger story goes something like this — “Blogger gets website. Blogger writes and writes and writes. Blogger builds an audience. Blogger wonders why no new business is coming in. Blogger had forgotten to tie the blog back to his business website.” Don’t be that guy. Integrate the blog into your business site. Make sure readers know who’s doing the blogging, and what else you can do for them.
- Keep it simple: It’s exciting for your inner geek to play with widgets, plugins, add-ons, modifications, customizations, etc., but your readers really don’t care about that stuff. They came to read blog posts. The cleaner and more pure you can make your blog, the better. Cut as much clutter as you can.
- Define an “audience of one”: Narrow your audience down to a specific niche (ideally one that meshes with your company’s target market), and then create a persona profile that describes an individual from that niche. Give him or her a name. Find a headshot you can use. Figure out what he or she wants out of your website, and then write all your blog posts to that one imaginary person. This will keep you focused on your audience at all times, and will give your voice a more personal touch.
- Stay on topic: Related to the last point — once you’ve defined your audience, only post things that are relevant to your audience. (Don’t dilute your blog with posts about your family, a great new movie, or how sorry you are for not posting more. Save that stuff for your personal site.)
- Provide content, not commentary: Rather than just “reblogging” links to other sites or blog posts with a quick little comment of your own, focus instead on being the site that other people are talking about. Post original thoughts, views, tips, etc., not just your rehashing of what other people have already done.
- Promote the blog through your business: Business blogging is a two-way deal. Instead of just using it as a lead-generation tool, make sure that your current customers know about the blog as well. It will help to build awareness, increase loyalty, and increase your ability to communicate on important topics.
- Answer the big questions: Business blogs are most useful in a time of change, and yet this is when many businesses panic and neglect their blog. When something is happening, many people will be hitting your blog for answers. Don’t let them down. If your blog seems to be pretending nothing is going on, people will lose trust in it, even during calm times.
- Enable discussion: If you want to have a conversation, you’ve got to be willing to take a few thumps. Enable comments on your blog, and don’t go around deleting everything that’s unflattering. The only things that should really be moderated are blatantly offensive trolling and obvious spam.
- Don’t obsess about traffic: It’s fun to watch your traffic spike when you get on Digg, or get a link from a major blogger, but the reality is that these traffic spikes have little effect on the overall success of your business. Stay relevant to your core audience, work hard to get the word out, and then be happy with whatever you’ve got. Even one interested reader can totally change the course of your company.
Mazda’s Blogging Mishap
Yesterday, Matthew spoke of companies jumping on the blogging trend much like they did with e-commerce shops years ago. In the comments I mentioned that the difference between the two online “eras” is that with blogging you know much more quickly if you are going to be a success or not. By accident I have found the perfect example and it happened this week.
BL Ochman caught an interesting site made by Mazada, a fake blog or pseudo blog if you will. Here are her thoughts:
Mazda blows it big-time with a fake blog HolloweenM3 that includes not one but three Mazda commercials disguised as videos found by a blogger on public access TV. The lastest video, titled Phantasmagoria, shows a bunch of 20-somethings riding around listening to heavy metal music in a Mazda with some ghouls.
It would be funny if it was run as a TV ad. It’s just stupid in a fake blog.
And you can bet it cost Mazda a gazillion dollars.
Other people in the industry caught wind of the blog as well and felt the same sentiments as Ochman. Funny I thought because if these people didn’t think the blog was going to be successful then there is a good chance that it wouldn’t be successful at all.
I wanted to provide a Business Logs analysis of the site and went to go visit it today, but it was gone. Gone as in it doesn’t exist anymore. There are no previous pages showing. Nothing. I couldn’t even find a Google cache of the site. This is probably the quickest I have seen the blogosphere impact a corporate blog ever. Hopefully Mazda has learned its lesson and will not make the same mistake again.
Corporations who view blogs as marketing gimmicks will quickly find that they are wasting both their time and money with them because the blogosphere does not tolerate this kind of behavior. The market has spoken and Mazda has done nothing but lower its reputation and waste money by trying to exploit a medium that they don’t understand. Bravo.