Lessons Learned in Corporate Blogging

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  mbmattis@...05/12/08 Report as spam
  1

  Choose Your Blogs Wisely

  As a former corporate blogger myself, I agree with Jon's recommendations.
  
  It's also important to decide what types of corporate blogs are best for your company. I've found that blogs around specific products or services to be the most successful, although a few companies have found success with general corporate news blogs, such as Yahoo's Yodel Anecdotal and Southwest Airlines' blog. It all depends on how authentic your blog is perceived. Generally, a blog about a product by a product manager or technician will be better rec'd than one written by the CEO (which everyone suspects is really ghost-written by flacks).

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  Geoffrey James, Sales Machine05/13/08 Report as spam
  2

  True.

  Michael is 100% right when it comes to having one ghost-written for the CEO. Especially by flacks. Ugh. The last thing you want is somebody who writes marketing copy for a living using a blog to suck up to the CEO.
  
  The kind of professional writer I thinking about is the kind who knows a subject matter thoroughly and has enough writing skill to do it professionally. And that the writer should be paid for writing it, rather just have it added onto a current workload.
  
  Blogging takes time and effort. The "amateurs" who do it well are are rare, in my view. The good ones are either written by professional writers (like Scott Adams) or by people who could be professional writers.

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  Geoffrey James, Sales Machine05/12/08 Report as spam
  3

  Hire a professional writer

  Writing is skill that requires practice. Chances are that most of your employees will only be capable of writing corporate dreck (or worse, academic dreck) because that's all they've been writing since they got out of high school.
  
  While you might discover a "natural" somewhere in your group, that's about as likely as sitting random children in front of a piano and expecting to find a savant who can play Chopin. ANd that's why almost all corporate blogs are unreadable.
  
  Remember, 99.9% of all blogs fail to attract a readership. And the ones that do attract a readership are always well written. If you're not willing to shell out some cash to hire a pro, you're just wasting time and effort.