Tips for Corporate Blogging

Last week I spoke to a company called Marqui for an article we published on Intranet Journal today. Marqui has a hosted content management system for marketers that allows them to easily publish their marketing message in several forms: e-mail, Web site, press release, etc.

The occasion of our conversation was Marqui's release of a blogging module for its software. It's aimed at corporate bloggers, which Marqui's President and CEO Stephen King sees as a group with entirely different needs than, for example, your average political blogger. Marqui's blogging module offers workflow so that posts can be approved or edited before they are published. Images can be chosen from a pre-approved gallery.

According to a report over at InternetNews this morning, the BlogOn 2005 Social Media Adoption Survey of corporate marketing and communications professionals found that 55 percent of corporations are blogging, with 91.4 percent of those using them for internal communications and 96.6 percent for external outreach. More than half had launched their blogs within the last year.

Marqui's King is right. Corporate blogs have a different set of rules. Their aim is to create a dialogue; not over Supreme Court nominees like a political blog, but to create a dialogue that, at best, leads to a sales relationship, or at least creates a favorable image of your organization. Some tips I've come across recently that bear mentioning:

• The first rule of corporate blogging should be to have a plan and strategy in place. P.G. Daly discussed this earlier in the year on Intranet Journal.

• Usability expert Jakob Nielsen published a list of blog usability guidelines this week that offers several useful tips for bloggers, especially corporate bloggers. It covers topics like headlines, links, and categories.

• Nielsen also has advice on using the Web for PR.

• Several Jupiter Research analysts (who also blog) did a 30-minute podcast on the topic of blogs and business.
  

I would add also to the tips, partly from my experience with this blog, that you stay on top of the search engine optimization. Depending on your blog software and Web team, you may have to tweak some tags to get the best performance. Your blog is useless if no one can find it.