SCOUT Corporate Blogging

Starting a Blog Archive

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2.1 How Does The Set Up Of A Blog Contribute to a Blog's Success?

posted: November 2, 2006 3:02 AM

We asked some questions about how a blog’s set up affects the relative success of a blog.  We chose the most important reoccurring issues described by the interviews.  The culture of the company was another important factor that can play a major role in helping to make a blog a success; the issue of culture is described in section three.

Strategic Planning

A number of the corporate bloggers thought that without a reason to blog, it is not a good idea just to start blogging.  They felt it was important to develop blogging goals in advance.  There has to be some reason as to why a company should blog. There are a variety of reasons why companies start blogging, including building a company’s brand and increasing a company’s search engine rankings.  One of the bloggers, Heather Hamilton of Microsoft, thought that corporate bloggers should have a real business goal behind their reasons to blog.  Heather stated, "The reason why I’m successful as a blogger at Microsoft is I have a job that can be accomplished through blogging, which is building our employment brand."

Other bloggers, however, did not think it was as important to develop initial blogging goals, These bloggers felt that engaging an audience online today was enough of a reason to start blogging. Dave Balter from BzzAgent said, "It’s a dive right in philosophy.  No matter what you think ahead of time, people will not cease to amaze you.  So, it’s best to learn over time."

Blogger Selection

In preparing to blog, it is important to pick the right people to begin blogging for your company.  Several of the corporate bloggers gave their insights into what characteristics to look for in a good corporate blogger.  These characteristics include:

• The ability to listen to your audience
• Passion for the topic
• The ability to communicate a personality online
• Perseverance and commitment
• Expertise in a field or variety of topics
• A warm and friendly approach
• Good writing ability
• The necessary amount of time for blogging
• Openness to criticism

A company can use these insights as a yardstick when identifying the right corporate blogger.

Zane Safrit from Conference Calls Unlimited thought that, "The best blogger is a person who’s the most honest, the most passionate, and the most committed."

Here is an example of how Emerson Process Management selected Jim Cahill to be their corporate blogger.  Deb Franke explained that decision makers in her company had two main concerns: Would their bloggers understand their brand and messaging?  And how do you associate a single real person or a number of real people in a very large company with huge brands like ours?  Deb said, “Jim Cahill became the obvious choice, however.  He has an engineering background; he has grown into a position where he is the hub of so many stories; and Jim knows so many people across the entire company.  In addition, Jim is the brand manager for many of the most popular brands.  The objections and concerns went away."

Jim from Emerson continued, "We didn’t expect the people who did have the expertise to begin blogging and building up a number of posts.  So, the strategy was that I would be a connector to the experts around the organization where I could tell their story individually and pop back on them in a few months based on what was going on there.  From other people in the organization they looked at it as a pilot for the company, but we wanted to show people both internally and externally that this could be effective and kind of a building block to get more bloggers going overtime."

Reading Other Blogs

Reading other blogs in your industry is crucial in gaining an understanding of your industry’s blogging community.  Many bloggers suggested monitoring other blogs for an understanding of their blogging community, ideas for posts and uncovering industry trends.

David Paull of MSInteractive's own readership grew the more he read and commented on other blogs.  David said, "I think it’s critical, if you want to have a successful blog, to comment on other people's blogs.  I think you have to engage in other blogs, otherwise just getting the word out about your blog is very hard to do."

Practice With An Internal Blog Before Going External

Starting a blog internally helps your employees to become familiar with blogging.  Ultimately, this makes the launch of a public blog smoother and its implementation more successful.

Deb Franke and Jim Cahill at Emerson Process Management specifically recommended an internal blogging strategy.  Initially Emerson set up an internal blog so employees could get used to the idea of blogging and podcasting.  The more employees that became interested in blogging and began to write on the internal blog, the more writers were added to the external corporate blog. Once the company had set up their blog, Deb and Jim worked with the HR and legal departments to set up a policy for the company, and then everyone could blog.

Adweek, Cathy Taylor

posted: October 29, 2006 9:19 PM

1.1.2 Company: Adweek

Blogger: Cathy Taylor
Student Interviewer: Melissa Buckley
Blog: http://adweek.blogs.com/adfreak/

Cathy Taylor is a journalist who works for Adweek. She initiated the Adfreak blog at Adweek and helps run the blog with her colleagues.

Cathy recognized the impact of political blogs on the country’s political discussion during the 2004 presidential election, and also noticed several blogs whose content on advertising competed with Adweek.  She recommended Adweek start a blog to compete with the advertising related blogs.  Cathy said that Adweek noticed the benefits of the blog being the conduit for all content related to advertising.  Cathy said this insight developed over time.

Due to the time constraints of blogging, the Adweek management decided the whole editorial staff would be able to contribute to the blog.  However, all content would pass through two gatekeepers, Cathy and Tim Nudd.  The two journalists serve as editors for the blog. The editors ensure Adweek steers clear of posts that might cause legal problems, makes sure content is on target with what the AdFreak audience is looking for and provides copyediting for the blog posts.

Cathy said there's definitely a correlation between the number of posts and the number of people who come to the blog; more posts produces more traffic.  When large influential blogs link to the blog the Adweek team also sees an increase in traffic.

Cathy said the person who runs the blog at a competitor, Adrants, comments on more blogs than the bloggers at Adfreak.  Cathy thought that the Adfreak team would probably comment more if they had the time.  She also discussed how she and her colleague send out links every once in a while and that she makes sure that the links she sends out are extremely relevant and important to the people she sends them to.  She suggested bloggers had to be judicious in sending links about posts to other bloggers.

Cathy does comment on other blogs, but she has so little time, that it’s just occasionally, and typically she comments when it relates to her blog posts, or when someone else has criticized what she has written previously.

After reviewing two commercials one by Apple featuring the music star, Eminem, and the other by Lugz Footwear, Cathy was really taken aback by how similar the two commercials were and commented on the similarity on her blog. Eventually the New York Times and other major newspapers picked up the story. Lugz Footwear started sending cease and desist letters to Apple.  All because a blog reader had sent a link to Adfreak asking the question, “do you guys think this looks really similar?”

Once Adfreak pointed out the similarity, everyone in the industry started to pay attention. Cathy even received a call from the ad agency who did the Lugz spot.  And Cathy was introduced to the spot's creative director.  There was a misconception that the production company for the Lugz Footwear spot had sent the link around the media community. Cathy took it upon herself to call media who had been contacted by Lugz' agency about the story, to let them know that was not the case. When she was working to set the story straight with other media, she changed her role from reporter to something else; perhaps PR person or a blogger.  Cathy questioned her role in the affair, and asked herself, “What am I now? A PR person getting the story straight, a blogger or the reporter?” and went onto say, “The lines that used to be so stark are just not stark anymore.”

According to Cathy, the content on the blog focuses on ad creative and takes a big time commitment but is also a big listening device about customers and stories.

Paperback Bazaar, Greg Chick

posted: October 28, 2006 9:48 PM

1.1.16 Company: Paperback Bazaar

Blogger: Ralph Wayne
Student Interviewer: Greg Chick
Blog: No longer working.

Ralph started his blog because he looked at forums in the comic book industry and discovered that many forums did not get a lot of participation.  He thought a blog would help promote his company without the need for much participation initially.

Discussing the issue of commenting Ralph described what generates the most comments on his blog, "We pick the content that will annoy people the most.” “One example is this week we were arguing about the new Batman comics, where everyone hates it but they keep buying it.  It would be like arguing about the new King Kong movie if you were a movie store."

Ralph went on to say "If they are going to blog they need something interesting to blog about and something that will get conversation going.  If you ask them how they feel about something, that’s not going to get a reaction from people.  If you get down there and say you hate this comic book it is the worst thing ever written you will get some reply to that.  You have to be entertaining. The web is either advertising or entertaining.  You have to give them a reason to be there."

Stone Creek Coffee, Tom Pionek

posted: October 28, 2006 8:11 PM

1.1.18 Company: Stone Creek Coffee

Blogger: Tom Pionek
Student Interviewer: Krista Grosser
Blog: http://sccv3.stonecreekcoffee.com/blog.cfm

Tom Pionek works at Stone Creek Coffee, a coffee roaster and retailer of specialty coffees. He has over ten years of Internet database marketing experience.  Tom helps run the Stone Creek Coffee blog.  Stone Creek Coffee has nine retail stores in the Wisconsin area.

Tom told us that the ability to change content on the website more frequently was a big factor in setting up the blog.  Nearly everyone at the roasting plant can blog although employees at the retail stores don’t blog, as those employees are more often than not very transitory, and so Stone Creek Coffee prefers to have those employees blog who will write over time.

Tom thought it was important for the people in his company to blog, "from the heart and not try to put a spin on something."  The employees try very hard not to make the blog seem very corporate by talking about their everyday work experiences.

As a measure of success, Tom tracks if his blog receives good feedback.  Tom said the blog has generated a lot of publicity for the company. Other non-company bloggers had a big impact on the company blog by commenting and linking to the blog.  Those links have helped with higher rankings on Google search terms such as “wholesale coffee”.

Tom said that he is trying to use the blog as a content generator for printed materials and newsletters.  He reuses the posts in such printed material for customers.

According to Tom, the content that generates the most comments are the posts about the coffee and the unique properties of their roasts.  Most of the content is about the product, stores, and community projects.  One of the posts that generated the most comments was when one of their store managers left the company.  Many well wishers to the store manager left comments on the blog.

Tom recommended that a company decide who is going to blog and have a schedule of content.

Appendix 5.0 Blogging Glossary

posted: October 28, 2006 5:32 PM

Blog / Blogging

A blog is a website that is typically driven by a content management system.  The home page of the website features articles or posts in sequential order by date.  Each post can be categorized and found through the side navigation of categories. 

Blogging is the process of writing a blog article or post on a blog, or commenting on another blog.

Blog Aggregator

A blog aggregator is a website that lists a number of RSS feeds from any number of blogs.  The aggregator features headlines or text from the RSS feeds of the blogs that are aggregated within the blog aggregator.

Blogger/Blogspot

Blogger or blogspot is a blog publishing system provided by Google.com for free to any Internet user.

Blogosphere

An informal term for describing the whole community of bloggers on the web, the term is also used to define a particular community such as the PR community of bloggers or PR Blogosphere.

Comments / Commenting

Blogs are a design of website that allow a lot of interaction between the writer of the blog, and the blogger’s audience. A comment dialog box allows a blog reader to make a comment on a blog post. Due to the increasing volume of comment spam, many bloggers moderate their comments before publishing them.

Podcasting

Podcasting is the process of creating an audio recording and syndicating that content through an RSS feed.

RSS feed

RSS or really simple syndication is not as you might think an example of stick man cartoons being syndicated through national newspapers but the syndication of one website’s content to another website or RSS feed reader.

Bloglines.com is an example of a web based RSS feed reader.

The advantage to the visitor who is using an RSS feed reader is that you know if the content on a website or blog has been updated without actually visiting the website. RSS feed readers are designed in such a way that the visitor can review a large number of feeds all at the same time. Some people have 50, 100, or several hundred feeds in their feed reader. The design is much more efficient than email, in that typically an email user does not know when they are going to receive an email, for example a monthly newsletter, but with RSS the visitor can ask for the content when they are ready to receive the information. RSS makes the process of monitoring content updates much more efficient. An RSS feed can be used by a visitor or website to request for updates to a website on a periodic basis or when a visitor returns to their feed reader.

What’s interesting is that the demand for content from publishers increases with RSS, instead of cursing more regular email newsletters than once a month, an RSS feed reader might begin to question the same content provider’s ability to produce content when they are not writing every few days.

The marketing opportunity is that your customers will be more likely to read your content, as you can break up the content into chucks over time, and also the RSS reader is able to see more content then they could ever do before.

SEO / organic SEO

SEO or search engine optimization is the process of optimizing a web page in order to increase the chances of the web page appearing at a higher ranking in editorial listings on a search engine.

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN feature two types of listings, editorial or organic listings and sponsored listings.  Organic listings are those web pages listed in a search engine, which are ranked without sponsorship by a search engine.  Organic SEO is the process of attempting to obtain a higher listing in the organic section of a search engine.

Technorati.com

Technorati.com is a search engine for blogs and RSS feeds.  The company developed the idea of tags.

Trackbacks

The best way for a blogger to alert another blogger that she has mentioned her work in a blog post is to use a trackback. Trackbacks send a notification to a blog that another blogger has written a post about their blog article. To send a trackback, a blogger has to copy and paste a trackback URL from a blogger’s article into the ping field of a blog content management system. Once the blog post and trackback ping is published the blog content management system notifies a ping server that the page has been updated. The ping server then notifies the blogging system of the blog from the original trackback that a trackback has been sent from another blog. A trackback link will then appear underneath the post on the original blog.

There is an increasing amount of trackback Spam from malicious blog Spammers, and so many blogging publishing systems allow bloggers to monitor trackbacks before deciding whether to publish the trackback.

Search engines give higher rankings to those websites that have more links from relevant websites. Trackback Spammers send trackbacks to obtain more links in order to get higher rankings on search engines and receive direct traffic. The correct etiquette in using a trackback is to reference in your post a blog post where you wish to send a trackback. Commenting in your own blog article about a blog article on another blog where you wish to send a trackback will increase the likelihood that a blogger will publish a trackback on their blog.

Successful trackbacks, like successful blog marketing, can only be achieved if a blogger understands that he is having a dialogue with other bloggers. Merely targeting other blogs for links will not only get your trackback deleted but may also give you a reputation for Spamming amongst your industry’s community of bloggers. Don’t send a trackback unless you wanted to comment indirectly through a trackback on a blog post, or you wish to reference some information provided by a blogger’s article on his blog. Only send a trackback if your post is relevant to the other blogger’s article. Lastly, definitely do not randomly send trackbacks to a blogger’s article when your own article does not even reference their post, or has nothing to do with the content on another blogger’s blog.