A Blogging Success Study was done by Northeastern University and Backbone Media, studying 20 cases of successful corporate blogs.
One of the sections of the report was really interesting – its about the recurring factors that help the success of a corporate blog, and in this section, five features were highlighted.
1. Culture
According to the paper, the culture of the company shows up very much on the corporate blog. It says:
If a company’s culture is warm and open, and a company is transparent about their blogging, this will come across in the blog. An audience and customers will then have a better connection with a company through its blog.
Talking about company culture – I think one of the key factors in retention of employees is corporate culture. To many people, the paycheck is important, but most would opt for a company they would be happy working in, one that has an open and friendly culture.
For a corporation to have a culture suitable for blogging, it must be open to information sharing. If the management of the company is all skeptical about “competitors stealing information” or things like that, its blog will probably not be interesting.
2. Transparency
Transparency is very much related to culture, and I’d think it would be terribly difficult to maintain a blog if you had to really keep sensitive and delicate issues behind the doors of the company. The feeling would be like having to keep a lie – its easy to lie, but its hard to keep it! I think the report puts it very well:
Transparency builds trust; trust builds interest; and interest builds an audience.
3. Time
Well, I’d so much agree to this! Blogging is so different from the one-off effort of building the static website. Blogs need to be updated with new posts frequently, and a blog without updates is one without visitors.
Companies need to realise this, that if they were to undertake a corporate blog, resources must be allocated for this initiative, and time – lots of time – must be spent. In fact, I would think that maintaining a blog (alongside marketing it) can be a full time job for one person!
4. Dialogue
One key function of having corporate blogs is to promote feedback from customers or potential customers about products and issues going on within the company. While a company blog (or any blog for that matter) can function without comments and conversation, I think it would be pretty boring!
Conversations stir up people’s interest, and tackles issues. The great thing about blogs is the all these conversations are accessible to the public, and adds content to the blog, which is then potentially searchable by search engines. So once issues are being tackled, the thread of comments can serve as a very useful FAQ!
5. Entertaining Writing Style and Personalization
Hah! The only reason why blogs are gaining so much popularity is because of the very personal voice of the blogger coming through via the blog post. In blogging, we KNOW that there is a real human behind the blog. If anyone wanted old school press ready styled articles, they would look for press releases!
That said, I think both PRs and blog serve their own purposes and appeal to different audiences. PRs are useful as big announcements (not that you can’t announce in blogs), and blogs give the more informal and “soft-launch” feel.
Conclusion
Remember that ultimately the main objective of the blog goes beyond “informing”, blogs created the avenue for corporations to speak direct to their customers, one by one, and it has revolutionized the way things have been.
Do you own a corporate blog? If you do, be sure to make sure you work on these five key features!
In point #5, you say that if people wanted “old school press ready styled articles, they would look for press releases.”
You’re referring to press releases that were written under the old rules–only for journalists, only when a company had “legitimate news,” releases no longer than one page, and with the “who, what, when, where, why and how” in the first paragraph.
But those rules can be thrown out the window. Today, thanks to the Internet, we should be writing press releases for consumers as well as for journalists. We can use releases to tell a story without the formulaic “5Ws” in the first paragraph. We can write longer than one page, and we can insert links so consumers can visit our website and enter our sales funnel, even if journalists don’t think our releases are worthy of their time and attention.
We can also post these same press releases in our website media room, and link to them from our blog.
Thanks Joan, for you input! Its a great point that you brought up, and I can tell its certainly from much experience.
I think with the Internet, we should really able to relook at PRs, and as you said, PRs can be for both consumers and journalists.
However, its something I think a lot of companies still haven’t realised – the ability to link out from PRs.
While a good number of PRs from the PR sites like PRWeb.com do have links out, what I have observed is that if you surf on to a non-technology company website, most of the PRs don’t have any hyperlinks!