Trawling through the blogosphere, I came across a couple of great posts on business blogging. There are some great take aways in there.
Chris Wetherell of massless in his post titled, "Corporate blogs, written well." says "I've grown to enjoy the official Yahoo! Search Blog and the Ask Jeeves Blog. They update frequently, have substantive, well-written posts and each blog has a unique style and is engaging. That corporate voice whose tenor usually creeps into the-song-every-company-likes-to-sing is dampened and even absent at times. Often each product announcement or investigation highlights a personal story that allows excitement to be palpable but downplays self-aggrandizement and often exposes the author's voice. It's real (or seems real) and it makes each post fun to read.
The Google Blog hasn't caught up yet. It's a surprising mis-representation - the culture we work in is fast, decisive, and colloquial but the blog voice is stiff. It's your not-so-cool uncle unbuttoning his shirt, listening to The Postal Service (but only the single of Such Great Heights) and proclaiming that Yeah, I totally dig your stuff you kids, this hip-hop speaks to me too. Um. Dogg. *flashes hang ten sign*."
I tend to disagree just a little bit on the Google blog, I have really liked their "How I Got To Google" series where they take up interesting recruits and get them to share their stories / talk about how they got to Google.
Dan James who is the CEO of silverorange, in his "CEO Blues" has a post titled, "Companies Can't Blog" where he says, "Companies don’t blog, people do. This simple truth is why we have CEOBlues.com, AcstofVolition, DeltaTangoBravo, WorksinTheory, and Newrecruit instead of blog.silverorange.com. A company, no matter how large, is a collection of people. It is those people that are interesting, not the company. It is those people that are best suited to shape a site and its content. It is those people who are the best representation of a company."
What Dan is saying is that instead of having a multi-user blog like http://blog.company.com you get your people to have their own blogs and let their individual personalities shine through. That may work great for Dan but I think the other way around where you actually have a http://blog.company.com and get your bright minds to blog on this one site will work well too. Being involved in the e-Learning space my case in point would be the in-the-news Tata Interactive Systems Corporate Blog which is a multi-author blog and which seems to be shaping up quite nicely. Good selection of topics, well written posts and good use of pictures to bring out the culture and personality of this company. These are interesting times and let us see how both of these kinds of blogs shape up and evolve!
Insightful entry on Corporate blogging. I have adviced several companies trying to get into "the whole bloggin thing".
* Its more important to create buzz value and create a personality around your blog than to try to "brand it around your company"
* Of course having a blog greatly enhances your search engine optimization efforts. So I encourage companies to keep an eye out for great articles that highlight some of the company's strategic keywords.
* Own your own domain. I have nothing against blog hosting services but I believe owning your blog (personal or business), building a following and earning the almightly PageRank in Google or other search engines can easily be lost if your hosted provider goes off the scene or changes direction.
** Thank you for the opportunity to share.
Sincerely,
Donatus Weobong
eLeaP LMS/LCMS
http://www.eleapsoftware.com
Posted by: Donatus Weobong | June 23, 2006 at 10:23 PM