A Guide to Corporate Blogging

A Guide to Corporate Blogging looks at why blogging is crucial to corporations and outlines 13 Steps Fortune 500 companies take to create a blog. Cisco, Intel and HP share their experiences and approach to blogging.

The first 2 steps are the most important. Number 1 is to determine if blogging is a good fit for your company – it may not be. Remember just because other similar organisations are doing it does not mean that you have to follow suit. There may be other, more appropriate channels of communication for your company. Number 2 is determine if your company is willing to invest in a blog. Although blogs can be built on free platforms, time and money will be needed to customize it. Then there is the cost of allocating staff hours for blogging, maintaining the blog and managing comments and feedback.

Jeremy Wright, CEO of b5media, noted, “A bad blog is worse than no blog. A dead blog is worse than no blog. But an engaging blog is one of the best things in the world that you can do for your business.”

The remaining steps are:

3. Create a strategy
4. Ensure that everyone is on the same page
5. Determine the Involvement of PR
6. Select Bloggers
7. Train the Bloggers
8. Writing Posts
9. Realize that the Blog doesn’t need a tone
10. Editing
11. Establish a Comment Policy
12. Develop a Promotion Strategy
13. Establish a Measurement program

The 33 comments to the posting take up more room than the article itself  but are worth reading. A couple of them mention the initial time involved to get started but that it is worth it in the long run in terms of increased traffic and business.