Corporate blogging is the newest weapon in the reputation arsenal. Spider and back-track sites such as Technorati ensure that everyone you reference will check your blog — at least the first time. But blogging is a weapon that can point in both directions. Some CEOs have embraced it, while others have introduced strict disciplinary policies against it. If you decide to go down the blogging route, what are the factors which distinguish you in the blogosphere from teenagers, disgruntled employees, and poorly informed citizen journalists?
There are a number of reasons why you, (or your CEO, if that isn’t you), might want to turn your hand to corporate blogging. First, it gives you a new avenue for free publicity on the web. Blogs are mined for information more rigorously than almost any other form of web-expression. Second, it lets you speak ’straight from the horse’s mouth’, whenever you feel like it, without the constraints of corporate newsletter schedules or the risk of journalists misusing your press release for other purposes. Perhaps most importantly, it gives you the chance to build an almost intimate relationship with a large, interested audience, who cannot but thank you if you give them insights into an otherwise closed world.
There is, of course, a risk: you may express yourself poorly, or, worse, let something slip that you would have preferred to keep quiet. On the other hand, if you have survived in business all these years, you have probably reached the point of knowing what is and is not safe to say in public. The real risk, of course, is that your blog will be lost among all the other voices on the internet, and you will effectively be wasting your time on a task which will never produce a benefit to your bottom line.
But all this is first-impression analysis. What are the real benefits of blogging, and how can you overcome the downside?
Benefits
There are three key benefits to corporate blogging, and it’s really up to you to decide if they are worth the investment.
They build more credibility than any other online activity. Reputation can only properly be managed when it is not under pressure. If you wait for the crisis of confidence to begin, it’s too late. A blog which is regular, personal, and not obviously an advertisement-in-blog-form will gain significant credibility for you as a commentator. When the crisis does burst, even people who have never previously read your blog can look back at your track record and buy into the credibility.
Journalists love them. Traditionally, journalists only had one way of finding out background information on your organisation, and that was by ringing people up and asking questions. The web has changed all that, but many journalists (and editors) are wary of unsubstantiated web-research, and even more wary of your corporate web-wares. A blog, though, as long as it is substantiated — for example by being linked from your corporate website — gives them vastly more of what they want to know, and predisposes them to believe it.
Reader comments can tell you the things you could not otherwise have found out, and they can do it quickly. Never underestimate the value of feedback from people who take the trouble to post intelligent responses.
How do you differentiate?
Chances are that, unless you have a very proactive IT department, you won’t be running your blog from your corporate website, although you should certainly link to it. In fact, running it exclusively on your website may damage its credibility. But in that case, how do you differentiate your blog from all the ‘others’ out there?
Spelling and grammar are the new rock and roll. There are now very few documents that are correctly spelled and punctuated throughout. For some reason, most people are more than willing to overlook their own errors, but see those of others immediately. Simply getting the spelling and grammar right is enough to lift your blog above 97% of those on the internet.
Stick to a style. Many blogs (including those intended to be authoritative) are quite random in style. They move from the formal to the personal to the over-intimate and back again with no apparent understanding that people only keep reading because they like what they are getting. The ideal CEO blog-style should be person-to-person but professional. Personable, but not over-personal. Write as though you were having lunch with a trusted friend from another industry.
Give insight, not information. Your blog can be informative, but what readers really want is personal insight. All of your corporate information, including your Annual Report, should be on your corporate website. Readers can look at that if they are interested. It’s fine to reference information, for example, to give a picture of the scale of business you are in, but most readers will let the figures just waft over them. You should be particularly careful (this goes without saying, but there have been unfortunate examples) of disclosing anything which could be construed as financial information.
Be consistent. You will gain maximum readership and respect if you regularly publish on a fairly limited range of topics that you understand thoroughly. Ultimately, you should aim to become the web’s number one authority on your particular field, but to do this you will need to build up a long back-catalogue of quality information.
Link to other blogs. Whenever you link to another blog, or to an intelligent website like news.bbc.co.uk, your link will be flagged up to the owner. If they check your link and like it, they may well link to you later, and they will quite possibly become one of your regular readers and recommenders. Naturally, this should give you pause for thought if you were intending to misuse someone else’s material!
Engage with the comments. Most blog systems allow you to solicit comments. You can have these moderated by default, which means you get to approve them, if you are worried about spam and random obscenities. Many readers will come back to your site after a few days to see if their comment has appeared, and to see if you have responded. You can build up a faithful following quite quickly if you engage with intelligent commentators.
Blogging should not be seen as an alternative to tried and tested means such as press releases, customer information and a well-designed website. But it can reach the parts that others do not reach. And for that, it is worth exploring.
