10 Keys to Define Your Corporate Blog's Identity
(April 7, 2009)


Blogs are all about expressing your point of view (POV) on something – hopefully a relatively unique view – be it your industry, products, clients or business processes and experiences. When conversing with clients about the need to express their personality in their blogs, they often misinterpret my meaning, thinking that they should show their funny or light side, when in reality we as readers, want them to show how all their experiences touch on the topic at hand.

 

So here are a few keys to help define and focus on the identity of your corporate or company blog.

 

  1. Your special POV. What special gift – piece of knowledge or experience can you share with the reader? Give them the inside track on things. What’s in the pipeline, why are the changes being applied, who are the stars in the company & what are they doing, where is the key to your company’s success?
  2. Company brand – culture. Not all companies are all that different but each is unique and each has a culture that is the day-to-day work lives of your talented and hard-working employees. Who are they and what exceptional things are they doing that make your company more interesting and a leader? Share just how wonderful they are outside the coffee or board room. People are key differentiators.
  3. Customer experience and success. Make it personal from their perspective.
  4. Share the love. Everyone wants comments on their posts – it’s natural to want feedback and feel validated. So, when you read other’s posts on blogs of people who might read yours as well... give freely and you will receive.
  5. Herd mentality and trendiness – you don’t have to follow but if the multitudes are interested you can at least comment on the latest trends and how they related to your experiences. Of course, you don’t want to look like a stick-in-the-mud, so temper your comments.
  6. Crisis management – you can turn a situation around for your company by offering openness and tackling those hot issues straight on. Give as much information as you can and when you can’t share something because of legal or compliance issues just say that. This is a crucial point in your communications with customers. Just ask Dell what a corporate blog can do for you in a crisis situation.
  7. Users using – you probably have some feedback from user’s who are using your product or service in some unthought-of or inventive ways, or even just practical hints for use that are served up to you from customers – share these.
  8. Problems and solutions – you have a privileged place when you blog, you can speak directly to your customers and have them speak back to you. So you can easily learn and address their pain points and respond to their concerns.
  9. Community building – each service or product has a community of users. If they are not interacting on your site, they are most likely talking about you elsewhere. You can participate on those other sites and take the opportunity to redirect them to your blog for answers.
  10. Link building – when these customers on other sites trust you they will link back to you as the trusted source. If you’ve done the rest, this works because they’ve begun to trust in your openness.

 

Most of all, be generous and genuine.



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