Ideas for Business

When talking with TopRank or M&O Account Teams about new clients, it is inevitable that I will ask if there is a blog involved. There are simply too many advantages to enabling a web site with fresh, themed content that is well structured for SEO benefits and that also offers a great platform for creative promotion, not to consider it in the online marketing mix. However, the mis-perceptions about what a blog is and is not abound, even with self-described “blogging experts”.

Despite that, I think it’s a perfectly reasonable question for a company to ask: “Why should we have a blog and what will it do for us?” Answering that question in the most effective way possible starts with understanding the business and marketing goals of the company. Too many SEOs and blogging consultants focus on the mechanical capabilities of a blog and not on the business goals that can be met.

Blogs are simply tools and are only as effective as the programs and people put in place to use them. The degree to which company goals can be met with the applications and current/future benefits of a blog are what we use to determine whether a business blog is appropriate or not.

Effective marketing initiatives have goals and measures of success. Blogs as marketing and PR tools are no different. Some of the measurable effects from business blogging include:

• Media attention
• Speaking requests
• Customer loyalty
• Inbound links to the blog
• Search engine ranking for the corporate site
• Corporate website traffic
• Leads/sales initiated
• Volume of blog traffic
• Technorati and other credible rankings
• Search engine ranking for the blog
• Increased company visibility within the industry
• Increased media coverage
• Improved customer loyalty
• Increased sales leads/revenue/new customers

If the majority of these measures (although each is not equally valuable) can support a company’s online marketing and/or PR objectives, then it makes sense to continue down the blogging path. Other considerations include:

• Hosting platform and limitations
• URL considerations - sub directory, sub domain, different domain
• Client side IT support/requirements/limitations
• Client side blog editorial and strategic ownership
• Client side content sources
• Meshing the blog content schedule with the company/web site marketing plan and communications/messaging objectives
• Client side resource allocation for research, writing, media creation and editorial
• Coordinated promotion of key blog posts
• Coordination of blog posts with offline, search marketing or media relations outreach initiatives
• Blog software, template customization and optimization
• Blog productivity plug-ins and anti SPAM tools
• Third party widgets and tools
• Training on blogging best practices
• Keyword glossaries
• Blogger relations and community outreach
• Developing a social network, profile development and channels of distribution/promotion
• Ongoing blog promotion - RSS, SEO, blog PR, social media
• Blog analytics and monitoring
• Blogging policy, legal considerations and copyright issues
• Trackback and comment policy
• Comment handling
• Quantifying the expense for outside consultants and internal resources for blogging and making estimates for a return on investment

This is a long list and many blogging consultants will tell you how easy it is to throw up a blog and they’re right. It IS easy to go to blogger.com or wordpress.com and create a blog within minutes. So why all the “considerations” you ask?

Things that are easy to get into are typically easy to get out of. The vast majority of blogs started are abandoned. TopRank’s point of view is that it doesn’t make sense to start a blog unless we do so in strategic support of a company’s business goals. With the potential for significant impact on business, marketing and PR goals, it makes sense to do all that you can to ensure success - making sure all bases are covered.  Blogging is new territory for most companies and being able to do so with a deeply experienced marketing partner can save a lot of headache, money, resources, time and embarrassment from failure.

Make no mistake, I am personally very biased towards the business building and marketing benefits of business blogs. Using a blog to promote our TopRank brand over the past 3, going on 4 years, has had considerable results that we’re very happy with. When an agency that offers business blog consulting services can successfully implement for themselves the services and consulting offered to clients, it says a lot about the agency’s capabilities.

As it goes with successful visibility on search engines for SEO related terms, the same goes for successful blog marketing programs with the adage, “If you can do it for yourself, you can do it for others”. What I would add to that is that it must be for the right reasons, expectations and measures of success or don’t bother.

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?

A couple years ago, Elliot Back took the initiative to survey 33,000+ blogs to discover the most common words used in blog titles. While the blogosphere has evolved somewhat in recent years, his results are still fully relevant when searching for a name for your new blog.

Because your goal should be to differentiate yourself from other blogs out there, you need to think past your initial instincts when it comes to naming your blog. Most people will tend to come up with the same sorts of names, and by avoiding those same traps, you start to set yourself apart from the mob.

Here’s what Elliot found:

The top ten names to avoid:
* blog
* life
* weblog
* world
* from
* journal
* news
* thoughts
* with
* daily

This isn’t to say that using those words will necessarily damage your brand, but rather that if you find yourself coming back to these same keywords, you’re probably thinking in fairly predictable ways. Break out, go crazy, and get creative with your blog name!