In this definitive guide, experts share best practices for business blogging.
Business blogging has passed the tipping point. Today, executives and professionals in the media, marketing, technology and public relations industries get much of their information from blogs and strategize about how to incorporate blogging into their marketing, advertising and communications campaigns.
Debbie Weil, author of "The Corporate Blogging Book," says "Whether or not you choose to launch a blog, you need to be reading blogs. Your employees and/or competitors are most likely already blogging about your industry niche -- or possibly your company, products or services. Get used to it. Make use of it. Track what's being said about your company in the blogosphere and you've just discovered next-generation focus groups."
But many questions remain. How should your company participate? How do you manage comments on other blogs? If you and/or your company already have a blog, how do you improve it editorially? How do you build readership? How do you improve its effectiveness? Or, if you are a journalist, how as an entrepreneur can you build your own publishing business? In sum, what are the best practices for blogging for business?
This article features 10 blogging tips from 10 experts, including luminaries such as John Battelle, Om Malik, Joseph Jaffe, two business blogging consultants and up-and-coming bloggers, who have generated new business or increased awareness of their brands. It is a "best of the best" in business blogging best practices. Most importantly, in the spirit of blogging, I hope YOU the reader add your comments here at iMedia Connection or on my blog TheDailyJoe.net as well as take detours to the (what I hope are) helpful links that I have included.
Plan, plan, plan, then plan
When I first launched my blog, a friend passed this helpful Guide to Business Blogging along to me. In it, Peter Flaschner of the Toronto-based consultancy The Blog Studio provides a simple yet comprehensive roadmap of what you need to do before you launch your blog. The bottom line: Plan everything ahead of time by answering the following essential questions:
- What goals do you want to accomplish by blogging?
- How much time and money will it require?
- What do you want to write about?
- What information do you want to share apart from the content (e.g. links, business profiles or resumes on personal blogs)?
- What technology do you want to use?
- How should the design reflect your company/people?
- How should you promote this site?
Apart from having all of those essential elements of the blogging plan outlined, one addition that blogger Jeremiah Owyang (whom you will meet later in the article) would add is to "Figure out a 'fire team' strategy for how to handle bad news, company crises or blog flamers."
Focus on what you know best
Of all the businesses affected by blogging, the media business arguably has seen the most change. Om Malik wrote for Business 2.0 until it was shut down by Time Inc. in October, 2007. Today he runs his own blog -- one of the most read in Silicon Valley and the technology world -- GigaOm. Malik encourages bloggers to "Focus on what you know best. If you take a scattershot approach [about the content], then you are going to have a hard time convincing readers to come back. Your audience/readers are coming to you for analysis and the ability to provide context to the news."
Now that Malik runs his own publishing company, he says, "The challenges are manifold -- worrying about traffic, keeping quality high and finding an ad-supported network. It is not easy, but then being on your own is never easy. I think the best thing we did is what media has done for years: separate business and editorial operations."
By separating church and state, Malik avoids the conflict of interest that bloggers face by wearing many hats. While they want to write great content, they also want to increase their page views, advertising revenue and/or marketing exposure, which can, if not managed, conflict with providing the reader/consumer with accurate information.
What has his blog enabled him to do that he couldn't do in the print world? "I would say the blog gives me a closer touch with my readers, and they constantly fine-tune my thought process. That was harder in the slower print publication format [at Business 2.0]."
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