The strong interest in company blogs continues (e.g., Forrester Says Firms to Increase Marketing Investment in Blogs, Fortune 500 Blogging Study). The investment is largely one of time more than money but how do you best leverage this investment? Here is a useful list from Mack Collier”s post, Five reasons why your company blog sucks.
1 - You use your blog as a billboard.
2 - Your don't answer or encourage comments.
3 - You rarely have new posts up.
4 - Your blog has little or no pictures, and is visually boring.
5 - Your blog creates little to no value for your readers.
Mark provides commentary for each point and you should go to his post for the details. I certainly agree with this list. The last one is the most important and often results from too much of the first one. The company web site can serve as the promotional tool so there is no need to have the blog do the same thing.
One and five also apply to company Twitter feeds. You can use the blog and Twitter to occasionally promote something but if that is all you do, little interest will be generated. Like TV, you have to first provide good content before you can offer commercials.
Sometimes companies are hesitant to open a blog up for comments but to me a blog without comments is not a blog. You can always monitor them and delete spam but that task is part of the effort. You also need to have a consistent posting schedule. It does not have to be daily but it should be consistent. I also agree with the visuals. I have been taking pictures with this in mind but sometimes resort to Creative Commons images on Flickr. Thanks to Mark for this list.
Bill: Thanks for pointing this Forrester report out. I've contacted our corporate information management expert and asked for a copy. It's always good to benchmark, but often quite hard to find hard data from other large corporations.
Posted by: Rich Hoeg | May 25, 2009 at 10:37 AM