Corporate blogs can have more appeal to potential clients than your company website alone. From the October 2005 edition of In The Black.
It’s pointless giving a list of the top 10 blogs (shorthand for Web
logs). The internet evolves too fast. The saying goes that 10 internet
years equals a normal year. But the blogging world moves even faster.
In March there were 7.8 million blogs. But by June, technorati.com, the
Google of blogging, reported there to be 11.5 million blogs. By the
time I was on deadline for this story in August there were 15.4 million
sites with 1.4 billion links.
And it’s the links that are important. The difference between a plain
vanilla website and a blog, is that a blog is a conversation.
It is raw, often the views of an individual and, in the case of
corporate blogs, often produced without the involvement (censorship) of
the marketing department or corporate machinery, and is regularly
updated.
Blog search company feedster.com ranked the top blog as engadget.com, with 54,380 links (see why links are important).
To date corporate blogs are mostly in the realm of the IT savvy or PR
companies, who after all are meant to be natural communicators.
Microsoft has softened its ‘evil empire’ image thanks to its bloggers,
the best known being Robert Scoble with Scobliezer, a raw unedited view
from someone who works within Microsoft. Outside the IT sector, Boeing,
GM, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Nike, Starbucks and Shell all have blogs,
as do an increasing number of media organisations.
But it is difficult to find up-to-date figures on corporate bloggers.
And to date there are very few in Australia. The best way to find blogs
is to search via technorati.com.
Simon van Wyk of Hothouse Interactive is a web-marketing pioneer in
Australia. He says there is now a genuine interest from his clients in
blogging to the extent that 100 marketing and media professionals
turned up at Blogfest, a Hothouse conference on the subject run in June.
‘It’s going crazy because it is a fashionable thing to do now and
clearly people are reading about it and thinking about and doing a fair
bit of vanity publishing,’ Wyk says.
‘There are definitely challenges there for corporates. One of the
challenges is you have got to have something interesting to say.
Otherwise at the end of the day nobody is going to come to your
website.’
One of the few corporate blogs in Australia is run by CPA Micheal
Axelsen (http://www.michealaxelsen.blogspot.com/) director of
information systems consulting with BDO Kendalls in Brisbane. Axelsen
tries to update the blog once a day, although he says in reality he may
only update it once or twice a week.
‘You have got to write something that someone might want to read,’ he
says. ‘And I wouldn’t claim to have huge readership of the thing. There
is always something coming out that is new and relevant. The theory is
that over time people will link to your website and to your blogging
and you will get some business out of it.’
However, it’s a very scary and difficult thing for many companies to manage.
Hothouse Interactive’s van Wyk says marketing is about having a conversation with customers.
But with many brands being very tightly managed there is nervousness in moving into the blogosphere.
The difficultly for many marketing specialists is to write compelling
and engaging content outside brochure-type materials and needing
experts to help.
In contrast to Axelsen, who runs his blog as an individual, Bibby
Financial Services has a blog where it seeks contributions from its
entire staff and has PR firm Jackson Wells Morris run it.
Ross Ayling, business development manager at Bibby says: ‘I’ve come to
understand that blogs seem to provide an easy way for us to have a good
channel of communication between ourselves, our existing clients and
the wider target market of businesses.’
He’d like to see blogs become known as a useful reference source for
any clients or those with an interest in financial services.
‘The blog is there to provide a wider range of information on various
topics which aren’t linked to the specific detail of Bibby products,’
he says. ‘If you take the same attitude and use the blog as another way
of promoting your company and products then really you have just
duplicated the purpose of the website and people who have gone to the
blog looking for some genuine articles or information of interest will
be disappointed if the only purpose of visiting is another dose of
Bibby product pushed down their throat.’
Trevor Cook, director of PR firm Jackson Wells Morris, has been
blogging since late 2003. He says one of the advantages of blogging is
that it allows companies to communicate with their clients in a more
personal and authentic way.
But he warns there are rules to follow. He says: ‘You have got to be a
bit cautious of what you say in a blog … I don’t swear on it, I don’t
bag off companies and I don’t blog about clients one way or the other.’
He says you don’t need huge audience numbers. You just want your ideas
out there so if somebody is looking for a consultant can find you.
‘You have to say something interesting. Don’t put too much pressure on
yourself,’ he says. ‘If you don’t find it fun and if you are worried
all the time if this is going to set the world on fire … We can’t all
be interesting all the time.’
By the time you read this there may be more than 20 million blogs out
there. But according to technorati.com only about 55 per cent are
active – nearly half have fallen by the wayside.
Hothouse’s van Wyk sums it up: ‘You’ve got all these people saying: ‘I
can create content, I’m interesting’. And one, they are not interesting
and, two, good, quality content is bloody difficult, time consuming
[and] expensive to create.’
Says Cook: ‘If you say something provocatively interesting you get
comments … the reality is that most bloggers don’t get a lot of
comments and don’t have a huge readership. Some sites become natural
places where people discuss things and others don’t. Sometimes it
happens on a site, sometimes it doesn’t.’
And as van Wyk says: ‘There’s just so much boring stuff around.’
Why links are important
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin first realised why links on
the Web are important. Page found a similarity between the way the Web
links and the way academic papers cite each other. The importance of an
academic paper is directly related to the number of papers it cites and
the ones that cite it back. The Web is similar and Page and Brin
devised an algorithm that was able to rank sites based on the number of
links and the importance of those links. Thus Google was born and now
the number of links in blog conversation is the measure of a blog’s
success.
Rules of corporate blogging
Get approval before embarking on a blog.
You have to have something interesting to say. Brochure copy will be ignored.
The best blogs are updated frequently so are more immediate.
The more you blog, the more people will visit.
Don’t blog about anything confidential. It is usually wise to steer clear of clients.
Avoid slagging off competitors or making negative comments about other companies.
Have fun.
What’s the difference between a blog and a website?
Corporate websites either serve some kind of online delivery function
or simply function as an online brochure, offering nothing but
corporate marketing literature.The focus of a blog is a conversation
without trying to sell anything. It is about comment on issues and
inviting the opinion of readers. Blogs are regularly updates – daily or
several times a week – and tend to be produced outside the corporate
marketing loop.
Is it a lot of work to establish?
No. Blog software packages range from free to cheap and the best, such
as WordPress, Movabletype, Typepad or Blogger, Blogsmith include all
the necessities needed to moderate comments and syndicate content.
Hosted services such as Typepad are the easiest to set-up. All are
designed to be easy to update online and some can even be updated from
a Blackberry or similar mobile computing devices.
I’ve heard about syndication and RSS what is it?
It simply stands for really simple syndication. If you use an
up-to-date version of Firefox or Apple’s Safari and visit blogs you
will often find the letters RSS on the right hand side of the address
window. Simply click on this and save to bookmarks and the browser will
indicate when the site or blog has been updated. Outside these browsers
you can download content aggregators such Feedreader.