Honest and engaging corporate blogs (Part 2)

(See part one of this article)

Blogs are one of those “simple, yet so complex” online marketing tools. On one hand, if you can talk clearly and captivatingly with your customers about issues they care about, blogs can go a long way toward making long-lasting connections that build your business. You don’t need an outline, nor a proposal. Just write and make it real.

On the other hand, you can really screw up a blog fast if you aren’t methodical about when you post, how you promote it, and how you handle the interactive element. As we wrote in the previous post: don’t take your blog lightly. Successful blogs need a strategy, and they need to be on topic, credible, interactive, and written by someone with an engaging online personality. By conducting one-on-one interviews with people reacting to corporate blogs, we discovered some golden nuggets for success.

In this post we focus on how to foster valuable discussions and gain critical mass. In essence: how do you write a blog that has regular, active participation from your target audience?

Consistency is everything. Yes, you’ve heard it before, but for corporate-sponsored blogs it’s critical to establish a schedule for posting and stick to it. Weekly posting is a typical schedule that seems to be manageable for most companies beyond startup size; participants in our study told us that occasional posting, such as less than once per month, seems uncommitted. We’ve seen some blogs hosted by big corporations that haven’t been active for a couple of years yet are still live on the company site. If you have decided that blogging is not your thing, please, take down the page or leave it up in archive form if other people are linking to your entries.

A blog without comments is no blog at all. This concept occasionally gets lost among marketers, but blogs are all about interactivity. If no one is commenting on your blog, it’s a newsletter—not a conversation. In the early stages of your blog, you may choose to hide the comments feature until you can see a certain threshold of click-throughs to the blog. Large-company blogs that only have a few people commenting look out of touch, so critical mass is key. Of course, if you aren’t writing about topics that generate discussions, it’s time to reconsider your editorial calendar. (By the way, it’s smart to have a bucket of ideas that you can plan around which map to activities and objectives going on within your company as well as industry events). For example, our research shows that readers love to hear about “behind-the-scenes” fodder. What is your company thinking about, researching and planning to do this year? What industry initiatives are your execs participating in right now? Finally, remember, as we wrote in our first post on blogs, negative is positive. You win more points with readers, our participants told us, if you don’t censure critical comments and you respond to them appropriately.

Promote your blog whenever and wherever you can. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of competition out there in the blogosphere, so no matter how sharp your content you’ll need to work hard to get any attention. First, ensure that your blog is front and center on your home page—or at least has a clear link on your navigation bar. Secondly, promote it by including the link within newsletters, direct mail, promotions and discounts, and customer communications such as invoices and welcome letters. Use Twitter or other social media outlets to share blog updates. Experiment with search engine optimization techniques that help to pull your blog up higher each week in Web search results. And of course, promote the blog within your company.

The research also showed us that companies don’t always test out their blog with users, as they would with a website launch. Listen to what your customers tell you and incorporate that feedback into your blog strategy.

Here are a few rules we’ve learned about staying credible:

1. Show what you are doing to change things for the better.  Talk is cheap if it’s not backed up by deeds.  Participants shared that it wasn’t enough for companies to talk about what they are doing—they need to show action. For instance, a pharma company could demonstrate evidence of how its products are now safer, through better clinical trials and FDA reviews that are publicly available on their site.

2. Don’t jump on fads. Does your product or service really serve a need for Americans hurting from the recession, or whatever is the topic of the month? If not, avoid trying to jump on a topic bandwagon, because you can quickly end up looking disingenuous.

3. Don’t make false claims. Consumers know that fast food and tobacco companies are not helping them make healthy choices, and companies in those industries will look foolish by pushing that ever-popular message in their blogs.

4. Share your human side, yet keep it business-appropriate. There’s no reason why a corporate blog can’t interject personal opinions or observations. For instance, the CEO blogger for an airline sometimes writes about how he gets frustrated with flight delays. Yet our research also tells us that people don’t want executives to get too personal, so it’s a tricky balance.

In summary?  Write what you’d want to read about if you were the customer and make sure the customers know you’re writing it. Understanding for sure what your customer wants to hear is another story—for another blog post.

What’s resonated with customers lately on your blog?