IVT News

Corporate blogs: minefield or bonanza?
Fri, Jan 12 2007

By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director

Blogs are the lifeblood of the "social internet" and with around 60 million blogs currently in existence they provide a large proportion of the content available online. This gives them huge potential as a tool for companies to engage with an audience in a way that hasn't really been possible before, but very few businesses seem to be taking advantage of the phenomenon.

Why is that?

I think it's primarily because blogs are an inherently non-corporate form of communication. They're grass-roots efforts, the voice of the individual speaking directly to the audience. What makes blogs work at all is their immediacy and raw honesty: the insight they provide into the individual blogger's life and mind. If you take that away and apply all the usual corporate rules about consistent messaging, and market placement, and return on investment, and branding, and political correctness, then what you end up with is a series of sanitised and outdated press releases.

And who wants to read press releases in their spare time? I sure don't!

But I *will* spend time reading the thoughts of an individual reporting "from the coal face" inside their company, describing what they do in the course of their job.

People often lose sight of the fact that companies don't actually do business with other companies. What really happens is that individuals within one company do business with individuals within another company. I hold that as true at all scales of business from the smallest all the way up to the biggest: when you see news reports about some mega-corporation doing a deal with another mega-corporation, it's not really the companies that made the deal happen. It's the people at those companies who got together, discussed their respective situations and nutted out a deal that suited their individual objectives. Even billion-dollar deals need individuals to sit down face to face and invest in developing personal relationships.

Companies are just frameworks: it's the people within the framework that make it succeed or fail, and in particular how they interact with people outside the company.

What this means for any business, large or small, is that it's critical to open the channels of communication to allow relationships to develop between individuals inside and outside your company. The more personal ties you can create with your clients, potential clients, suppliers, and even competitors, the better off you'll be. Think of it as building inter-company partnerships one individual relationship at a time.

And blogs are *perfect* for that!

The big difficulty with "corporate" blogging is the feeling of being out of control. This is particularly felt by those high up the corporate ladder who are used to enforcing policies relating to the public image of the business and ensuring a consistent message. It can be really hard to give up that control and let members of staff share their personal opinions off-the-cuff for the world to see, with no editorial oversight or legal vetting process or management approval of each post. But as soon as you try to impose those things you're back where you started with stifled inter-personal communications and nothing but a series of boring press releases.

On the other hand, you don't want your staff revealing confidential information or insulting your clients on their blogs either. That sort of thing can destroy your business in the blink of an eye.

It's a fine line to walk, but the trick is to walk it with your eyes open and to be ready to adjust course as you go. The fact is that in a company of anything more than a couple of people it's likely someone is blogging anyway, so you need to be aware of what they are saying and how they are saying it. Don't just close your eyes and hope the bloggers in your company are doing the right thing!

So here's my recipe for building a healthy blogging culture in your business.

1. Establish a company blogging policy.
The company blogging policy is a list of rules to protect you: it makes it clear what your company says staff members should or shouldn't do when blogging in the context of their work. For example, your policy may state that staff shouldn't reveal information which is currently held under a non-disclosure agreement, or that they shouldn't reveal the names of clients without explicit permission. It should also make clear who owns the content of blogs.

You can find a list of some good blogging policies online.

2. Provide a blogging code of ethics.
A blogging code of ethics is a set of guidelines to help your bloggers be as effective as possible while playing the game the right way. It should cover points such as acknowledging and correcting mistakes promptly, being respectful of other opinions, disclosing conflicts of interest, and being honest at all times.

Charlene Li from Forrester Research provides a good example Blogger Code Of Ethics.

3. Encourage staff to establish blogs.
While it may be tempting to provide your staff with blogs at the corporate domain, try to encourage people to create their own blogs at a personal domain or one of the many blogging services available. There are a couple of reasons for this.

The first is that it forces you to disengage from the individual blogs and recognise that what is posted are personal opinions, not corporate communications. It's less tempting to "sanitize" what your staff are saying when it's outside the company domain, and readers will also relate to the blogs on a more personal level which increases their credibility and the likelihood of being linked to.

The second is that by dispersing the blogs you gain some benefit from the "network effect" of posts that reference each other. Search engines place great importance on inter-site links so this can actually improve your search engine rankings.

4. Set up a corporate blog aggregator.
A blog aggregator is a system that takes posts from multiple blogs and collates them in a chronological list in one convenient place. By running a blog aggregator on your site and configuring it to include posts from staff blogs you can provide a great resource for your customers to browse through a variety of posts and get a good idea of the sorts of things your business is up to. Your company website gains the benefit of interesting and frequently changing content provided by your staff without adding any extra burden: it all just happens automatically.

5. Encourage your staff to blog.
Lead by example with a blog of your own and develop a culture where staff are encouraged to communicate with the wider world through their blog.

Before you know it you'll have a healthy buzz around your business with the potential to generate more exposure and goodwill than a sizable marketing budget.

For basic background information on blogging there is a good reference at Wikipedia.

For more information on corporate blogging the Forrester Research report by Charlene Li is definitely worth a look.