Corporate blogging
Tonya McKinney is a triple-threat (journalist, marketer and technologist). I asked Tonya about corporate blogging and want to reprint some of her comments here.
TONYA: I was NOT going to invest in blogging unless we had hard targets/metrics. Except for driving repeat traffic to the website with frequent blog entries, we were pretty stumped as to how to use a blog to support marketing goals. Other communication formats seemed better suited…newsletter (fresh content/subscriber opt-in base), webinar (live interaction), white papers (thought leadership), etc. But we kept digging since blog traffic was skyrocketing, specialized search engines emerging, all sorts of technologies and new businesses were popping up, AND 11% of our site traffic was from blog referrals. There HAD to something we could do to leverage this!
In the middle of our research, a scandal hit about one marketing blog program that blew up–Marquis. Here Stowe Boyd’s blog discusses the issue.
Marquis had been paying bloggers to endorse them, and although Marquis’ party line was “any publicity is good publicity,” we were not interested in this kind of publicity. As my team discussed whether this was an actual “scandal” or not, we realized this program had violated some core beliefs people have about blogging–beliefs that make blogs so popular:
1) a blog is personal–it is one person’s opinion and experiences. Guests bloggers and crosslinks are ok, but ghostwriting and paid endorsements are not.
2) a blog is honest and credible–in it’s own way. If your blog is a steady scathing criticism of everything, you better be true to that promise.
3) a blog is candid, open, and conversational–it is not bound by stuffy, formal writing styles. It’s relaxed, often edgy and controversial. No “business speak” allowed.
4) a blog is biased but not deceptive. Blogs can be blatantly one-sided. Bias is ok as long as the writer believes in what he/she is saying.
The scandal really highlighted the value of blogs, and we realized that this format could help us achieve marketing goals faster and incrementally by:
1)Yes, it could drive repeat traffic to the website with frequent posts, but more importantly…
2)Customer reference stories. We could post experiences and lessons learned daily from customer implementations–why wait to write up a full-scale, formal case studies (typically so boring, anyway)? And blog posts would be more believable, interesting and current.
3)Competitive messaging. We could discuss our competition openly. We’d never do so in typical marketing communications like datasheets. And, we could get competitive information to the market faster.
4)Thought leadership. We could test forward-thinking, experimental ideas without writing full formal white papers.
The key is to have one person own it and don’t try to force/over control information–just write about what’s really going on and feel free to be opinionated.
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