The Blog Medic

In this series, I’ll be writing about the challenges of becoming a corporate blogger, from choosing your company and building a community to getting the right technical setup and getting support from your board of directors.

Being a corporate blogger was completely unheard of a mere 5 years ago, but now that businesses and organisations are starting to pick up on the benefits of a blog, more of us “fall into” this kind of position.

Writing for your current employer

If you like the company you work for, you’re proud of what you do and you’re relatively extroverted, your company may actually welcome your interest in blogging. It takes a relatively forward-thinking company to do it well but it probably won’t take that much to convince your boss that it’s worth trying. It’s a reasonably low-cost experiment and the rewards can be significant.

Lionel Menchaca, is a great example of an employee who started as tech support for Dell, to later on become Dell’s first blogger. Michael Dell was perceptive and listened to his team when they suggested that a blog could help improve the perception of the company in the public eye. It paid off.

“When we started, the tone of the blogs out there were at their worst point for Dell, with about 48% of them negative toward us. Now we’re at 24% negative. I’d say we’re having a positive impact,” says Lionel in a Globe & Mail interview.

Writing for a new company

This one’s tricky in the sense that you don’t really know what you’re in for. You’ve seen the public face of the company so far, but you don’t know what’s waiting under the bonnet - Either a great, happy team who’ll provide fabulous support once you start or a group of risk adverse people, set in their ways, weary of new media and change.

Regardless of which background you come from, there are a few ways to assess what the landscape is going to be like along the new path you’ll be taking.

Before you say yes

1. Pick your product/service carefully

Think long and hard about whether you support the company’s work. You may be getting excited that, as a coffee lover, you’ve been asked to write for a coffee company. But what if they don’t use fairtrade and organic coffee but you’re a strong believer in equitable trade? You can hopefully change the company from the inside, but are you willing to risk writing for a product you don’t believe in?

Dig deep before you start, get to know as much as you can. The good but also the bad, the dirty and the historical. Your faith and passion for your product will ooze from your words if it’s genuine; the Campaign Monitor guys, for example, clearly love what they do and it shows in every single blog post they write.

2. Pick (the brains of) your future boss

As much as possible, whether it’s your current or future team lead, manager or CEO, be sure to quiz them about their views. This can be tricky in an interview, but try to glean what you can of the overall moral values of the company as well as the individual attitudes of those who will be involved.

• How do they feel about new media? How much do they really know about it?
• How much control do they plan on giving you and the team that will support you?
• How brave and wild do they want the blog to be? Is this an improved PR platform or genuinely a conversation? How well do they cope with crisis when things go a bit pear-shaped?

When Lionel started blogging for Dell, the first crisis he tackled was a report of laptop batteries going up in flames. He immediately started talking about the issue, saying Dell was investigating. His team, like most traditional PR teams, gasped at the thought of giving the problem attention publicly rather than attempting to brush it under the carpet. Lionel’s approach paid off, as customers were kept informed every step of the way until a battery replacement program was put in place.

Will your team be receptive to admitting to flaws, asking the community for support and being more transparent?

3. Do your own sanity check

Hopefully, you’ll have done this before you started looking into blogger jobs, but it’s an essential part of the process. Be introspective for a moment and think of how you feel about putting yourself in the spotlight. If you’re already a blogger, you’ll have had a taste for it, but it’s likely that the spotlight will be a while lot brighter this time around!

In a regular job, a small team of people will be intimately aware of your success or failure at the end of the year, but as a blogger, you’re seen by everyone, assessed by every reader every day. Can you cope? Are you ready to be the rockstar of the web? Will your ego bruise easily when fellow bloggers disagree with you?

Every job brings its own challenges, and here you’ll need to be very resourceful since not every improvement can be measured through quantifiable metrics, something most directors and managers have come to expect. Can you illustrate to them the progress you’ve made? (We’ll cover ways to achieve in a future post.)

Getting started

1. Set expectations early on

Before you get down to the nitty gritty of daily posts, get everyone who’ll have a finger in the blogging pie for a kickoff meeting. Let them talk about what they want to achieve with the blog. This can be only you and your line manager, or people from all departments including the CEO.

Why not use the old focus group Post-it technique? Give everyone a small stack of Post-its and ask them to write down what objectives they think the blog has, what topics they want to cover, what they want to ask the community. Look for common themes, educate where expectations might be unrealistic or off-target and get objections nipped in the bud.

By doing this early on, everyone will have a chance to express themselves before you build your strategic plan. It isn’t a guaranteed way to avoid internal disagreements, but it should help the team be in tune with each other.

If you’re expected to play multiple roles in the company, let your blogging needs be known; it’s more than just putting a few hundred words into a blog platform and hitting “publish”. Coming up with ideas takes time, dealing with comments & keeping on top of the buzz takes some time, so ensure your manager is aware of the time you need.

2. Strategise, but be flexible

Now that everyone’s cards are on the table, create a strategic plan.

• What are your objectives?
• Who is your target readership? How will they find out about our blog?
• What kind of material will appeal to those readers? What frequency is suited to them?
• How can blogging efforts tie in with other company marketing? How much of a hand will the marketing department, or a PR agency, have (if any!) in shaping the blog?
• How can colleagues contribute or support blogging efforts? What do we need to do to get internal awareness?

Remember, once these are on paper, that they’re not set in stone. In my first corporate blogging experience, 50% of the strategy went out the window after two months, and we changed our tactics altogether. Be flexible and remember that, as Edison said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Be patient with colleagues and directors who make suggestions or try to steer the blog in a direction you may not agree with. Be diplomatic in explaining what will and won’t work, back it up with articles from fellow business bloggers and breathe deeply.

3. Listen

Your team and your fellow bloggers will provide some support and steering for the blog, but the most important people to listen to are your readers. Obvious, I know, but sometimes we forget.

Reply to comments from your readers, look at their behaviour and the posts they seem to be more responsive to. Which of your posts create ripples across the web where, not only do readers comment, but fellow bloggers continue the conversation on their own blog?

Ask these questions both online and offline. Lionel and some of his colleagues attended South by SouthWest Interactive in March on behalf of Dell, getting the opportunity to talk to users face-to-face. Find out where they hang out and let them talk to you. Don’t be tempted to sell to them while you’re there, just listen and share the feedback with your colleagues.

These are just some of the early stages of launching a corporate blog. Next time, we’ll look at getting the right technical foundations and setup to make the most of your company’s blog.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing a series of posts on the challenges of becoming a corporate blogger, from choosing your company and building a community to getting the right technical setup and getting support from your board of directors.

I’ll begin the series at the beginning: The different types of bloggers out there. Do you recognise yourself here? Did I miss your “type” altogether?

1. The leisure blogger

The most common kind of blogger you’ll find, he’ll have launched his blog on a whim one late night after getting angry at something in the news. Posts tend to be few and far between, varying in quality from gems of insight to blurry cat photos. Very hit and miss, these usually have a small readership of friends and family mainly, and the author feels little guilt if it becomes a ghost town.

2. The semi-organised leisure blogger

This type of blogger has put at least a few evenings into planning the blog and there will generally be a common thread and theme to the blog, something he’s passionate about and could discuss all night long.

He’s more likely to have customised his template and may have even put some ads or an Amazon link in the sidebar, in the hope it might cover some basic hosting cost or a beer at the pub. The author will occasionally tut and say “I really need to update my blog. I should write about this…”, feeling a slight twinge of guilt at choosing to watch tv instead. He probably doesn’t feel such guilt to secretly blog on company time.

He probably hasn’t bothered putting any analytics on his site and vastly underestimates his readership. These readers arrive due to a few posts’ keywords getting picked up by search engines for terms that are probably a bit niche, to do with gorillas and peanut butter or something…

3. The freelancer

This blogger isn’t a full time writer but tends to be dedicated to getting her name out. She writes regularly, providing incisive insight into modern day issues, but for someone else’s brand, getting a small payment for every post.

She probably has a personal blog which has been deserted since the pressure of a regular job and the writing deadlines have sucked all her ideas out. She’s confident that One Day, She Will Be A Real Writer, but for now, it doesn’t quite pay the bills, so other priorities occasionally take priority over writing.

4. The full-time blogger aka journalist 2.0

This more unusual animal will introduce himself as a blogger in most circles, but will just say “oh I’m a journalist” when speaking to traditional media people, knowing very well bloggers aren’t taken seriously everywhere.

He can make ends meet through writing but feels like battery chickens in weeks surrounding big events in their field, being pushed to the very limits of how much he can write. This blogger is most likely to die from blogging exhaustion, or start regurgitating press releases just to meet targets.

5. The corporate blogger

The corporate blogger is a dove.

By that I mean, some people will watch it in awe, as some being that has fascinating connotation attached to it. A representation of world peace, magic and great wonder. Others will sneer and say “They’re just white pigeons. They’re still a pest like rats, and need to be shot”. They’ll both be right. (well, except for the shooting part, I hope.)

As a corporate blogger, she faces the challenges of pleasing not only readers and other bloggers in a similar niche, but also those put forward by her boss who may, or may not, understand blogs. It’ll involve setting targets, KPIs and forecasting, which can be a bit tricky without prior knowledge of the market!

Now, let me say that I’m not particularly fond of the term corporate blogger. “Corporate” is a big dirty ugly word in my books, which I associate to the big dirty ugly highrises in the city, faceless companies and suits where your tie is hiked up so tight that you almost turn blue.

But I’m going to use the term corporate blogger anyways. Why? Because I think everyone understands what it means: A blogger who writes on behalf of and, often, about the company that hired him/her. It can be both a blessing and a curse: Lucky enough not to have to hide your blogging window when the boss approaches, but married to a brand, for better or for worse.

While I surely don’t have all the answers, I hope that I can shed some light on this last segment of bloggers in this series of posts. I’ll offer tips & tricks based on what I’ve discovered working as a corporate blogger, as well as some fantastic gems of wisdom fellow bloggers have shared with me over the past few years.

In the next post, we’ll look at choosing the product, team and company you blog for wisely.