Best Practices for Corporate Blogging
Yesterday Sandro Groganz wrote about his experience helping a customer get started with blogging to promote their open source products, and towards the end of the post he offers some good tips for common questions companies have as they enter the world of blogging. While I agree with Sandro that organizations should adhere to some basic blogging guidelines—like ensuring that different bloggers “are in line with the main marketing message(s)”—I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules around things like how often to post and whether to respond to comments via additional comments or a new post. The best rule of thumb is to do what feels right to the individual blogger and fits with the corporate culture. Bloggers in an organization often handle some of the blogging details a little differently, and that’s ok.
I’m reminded of a story I heard on NPR a year or two ago about how the social norms of email communication are still evolving. For example, if you email a question to a colleague and receive an answer in return, should you respond with another email just to say thanks? In other words, when does the email conversation end? Ask a few different people, and you’re likely to get a few different answers. The NPR piece noted that it took many, many years for society as a whole to accept norms for telephone conversations—like answering the phone with “hello” rather than “ahoy” (apparently there was quite a debate in the early years of the phone). So it may be unreasonable to expect similar conventions for email communication to be widely accepted at this point in history, and I think blogs are in a similar evolving state.
For individuals and organizations new to the world of blogging, I highly recommend Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. This book presents a number of different approaches to blogging taken by various individuals and companies, and the general conclusion (at least as I remember it) is that there’s no right way or wrong way to blog. Just be yourself, be honest and respectful to others, have fun, and understand that each time you blog you’re entering a conversation with readers from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. You can make up the rest as you go along, and odds are you’ll find yourself blogging more frequently as you get comfortable with the process and start seeing the benefits that blogging can deliver to your company.
4 Responses »
Greg makes some salient points regarding blogging.
Indeed, I believe corporate blogging is experiencing the same evolution corporate Web site went through in the mid-90s. Companies threw money at departments and told the units to build Web sites.
A few years later, companies (or, rather, consulting agencies) began extracting best practices and began to build Web site strategies that introduced the birth of Web 2.0.
We can become quite pedantic when we try to discern the magic set of rules that will make Internet technologies fit into the golden quadrant of money-making tools. Sometimes, we simply overdo it.
I think an issue here is that there’s really no one single genre “corporate blog”, but instead an entire family tree of types. For example, a developer’s blog at Sun is not the same thing as a blog about McDonald’s’ CSR activities or Dell’s customer support blog. Nike has a blog about basketball (and their shoes) that’s obviously a marketing tool, while GE maintains an R&D-oriented blog.
A taxonomy of different kinds of corporate blogs might help. I fully agree with your bottom line though – in the end, each blog has its own best practices and is fairly resistant to standardization.