The ghost in the blog

Category: online PR
Posted by Nicky on 5th January 2007

There’s been a lot of “trend” talk recently in relation to the blogging phenomenum but, for now, one thing seems very clear: the impact of the online conversation is continuing to grow.For many businesses, the widening influence of social media means that getting to grips with these new channels is no longer optional, but now a fundamental part of connecting with important audiences. As a result, companies are increasingly taking a serious approach to social media tools such as blogs.

There are lots of great reasons to start a corporate blog – to give a platform to your expertise, to reinforce brand values, even to test out new ideas – but overt promotion shouldn’t really be one of them. The medium of blogging today is about building networks, developing dialogue, and forging closer relationships, not just externally but with internal groups as well. Maintaining a blog undoubtedly requires planning, time and commitment and, like any customer relationship and knowledge management tool, blogging is best viewed within the context of a long-term strategy. The return on investment, however, may be much deeper long-term relationships with your customers and stakeholders.

So, what does a corporate blog look like and who best to write it? The purist’s definition of a “classic” blog would argue that it should present the personal voice, views and interests of the author, in an informal, conversational tone; offer frequently updated content (generally accepted definition: posting more than once a week); include links to other bloggers or websites, and provide a mechanism for creating a dialogue with readers.

Many of these grassroots principles still pertain when it comes to the corporate blog; however, like much in the online world, the blog is constantly evolving and taking on new forms. The growth of collaborative publishing as a whole has led to extensions of the original blog concept, and we’re now seeing the emergence of “group”, “multi-user” and “aggregate” blogs. For businesses, the group blog offers a different kind of platform for direct communication, authored by multiple employees. A recent example is Poliblog, Verizon’s technology and communications policy blog, written by senior members of the corporate communications and public affairs team.

One of the guiding principles of the corporate blog can be to promote trust between the company and its audiences, and also create a real sense of connection. The employee (or employees) best suited to fulfill this objective will differ from company to company. Sun Microsystems, for example, has embraced blogging to a level that demonstrates total commitment to the art form: actively encouraged to blog, employees in their hundreds post daily, and CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog is one of the most widely read in the blogosphere.

The best person (or persons) to create that connection and fulfil your blog objectives will be dictated by the audience you’re seeking to engage with, and the overall focus of your blog (it could be devoted to a single topic or serve as a more general forum to discuss issues and stimulate debate). Your prime blogging figurehead may be your CEO, but it may equally be your COO, your head of corporate social responsibility, or one of your applications engineers.

Whoever your corporate blog is written by, there is an implicit code of ethics and responsibilities to which all companies need to be sensitive. Authenticity and transparency are the watchwords of the online conversation. As corporate blogging has moved up the communications agenda, it would probably be naïve to assume that high-profile blogs by CEOs and other senior executives are published without some form of review or refinement by the corporate communications team. As with other conflicts of interest, however, it’s best practice for significant co-authoring to be declared clearly on the blog. While your chief blogger may not be a particularly polished writer, a totally ghost-written blog would seem to run counter to the spirit (no pun intended) of the medium. The authorship question is an interesting one. In the UK, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations is currently conducting a major Social Media Consultation with its members to determine, amongst other issues, how and to what extent PR consultants should be involved in personal publishing on behalf of clients.

For some companies, the lack of control represented by blogging in general can seem a little scary. The most enjoyable blogs (from a reader’s perspective) often seem spontaneous and “off-the-cuff” – perhaps not the natural comfort zone of B2B communications, in particular. Again, Sun’s guidelines to its employee bloggers are typically comprehensive. By the same token, adhering strictly to the pioneering bloggers’ values of inclusiveness and transparency can mean exposing your brand to criticism, in the form of negative comments and postings. If you’re doing things right, the criticism is likely to be highly visible (Google loves content that is regularly updated) and everyone – including the media – will be able read it. The plus side of all this openness and visibility, of course, is that corporate blogs also represent a fantastic opportunity to put the other side of the argument – unmediated – and give a platform to (and even create) customer evangelists.

Before launching a corporate blog, companies need to decide upon a clear policy for dealing with all of these issues, such as if and when to delete comments. In terms of balance, it’s probably as well to follow the guiding principles of being a good conversationalist: bloggers need to be able to listen as well as to speak.

Once you’ve taken the decision to establish a corporate blog, the next step is to publish it, let everyone know that it’s there, and create an RSS feed so that readers can subscribe and be alerted when new content has been added. We can help with the end-to-end process, from developing, maintaining and measuring a blog, to making sure it’s optimised and tagged for maximum visibility in Google and Technorati.

There’s a lot going on out there in cyberspace, and blogging is just one channel, but it’s increasingly being seen by companies as an important way to get closer to customers. One of the very latest corporate blogging converts is Bill Marriot, Chairman and CEO of Marriott International, who launched his weblog earlier this month, at the age of 74. He might dictate his entries on to a tape-recorder rather than use a computer, but his blog launch is one arm of a marketing strategy aimed at connecting with the sophisticated, Net-savvy travelling public. We won’t dig up the “old”, “blog” and “new tricks” gag but it’s a good illustration of how communicating with customers is demanding a forward-thinking attitude and an openness to new ideas.

e-marketing

evokedset news

online PR

PR

Uncategorized