Blogging for Business
Related entries in Business Blogging, Blogging Basics, Blog software & tools
BlogHer Session: Blogging for Business
Speakers: Lisa Meyers Brown, Susan Getgood, Christine Halvorson, Mary Smaragdis
How to be successful:
1. Define your topic
2. Hit an emotional chord, not just intellectual ones
3. Use banners to your advantage to grow your traffic
4. PR works
5. Maybe ignore the ROI and focus instead on changing attitudes not sales
6. Corporate culture must foster trust and internal dialogue
7. Have a policy
8. If you don’t want it to be in a press release, don’t put it on a blog
9. Be risk tolerant - goes with trust
10. High level executive support
11. Be open to the value of community
12. Be willing to let go of some editorial control
13. Show you are committed to it
14. Keep the motivation high, and this can include helping with topics
15. Write about what you know (topic and opinion)
16. If you allow employees to blog, allow them to do it whenever with the caveat that the rest of what they do needs to be done
17. Speak to your niche community of readers, if you know who they are. Otherwise be more broad.
18. What is your mission? Stay true to it
19. Is it a product blog? An ‘on the scene’ blog?
20. Find the great writers in your company, no matter what they do
21. Do not be afraid of having opinions.
22. Express honest opinions on competitors, but don’t push it
Who should do it? You, your employees or (ack) your customers? Strategy comes into play here, of course. You can also do all three.
If you have evangelist customers, ask them to be a part of a customer blog. They must be customers present online, of course, and this is especially true if fan sites build up. You also must make it fun and easy for your bloggers to write. After teaching them how to do it, perhaps, you can also provide inside scoops and help interaction build through comments. You can also engage with fan sites, rather than starting up all new customer blogs. It need not be controlled within to filter your news.
Stonyfield Farms blogging came about after the CEO worked on the Howard Dean campaign and saw the benefits of blogging.
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