I got a couple of questions this week forwarded to me from our sales team and sent directly from some of our customers. Will the corporate blog site get the company more exposure? That is a question with several “Yes's” as answers and with several “If's” too. Yes, the corporate blog will definitely help you get better search engine ranking and drive more traffic to your website. But you also have to help the situation. It will not happen by itself. You have to do your homework and keep doing it all the time.
You have to know first that Google and Yahoo have different indexing mechanisms and this brings different results to both search engines. You also have to know that usually the blogging software you are using and especially our system will automatically ping the main blog search engines but each corporate blog’s administrator will have to help too. For example: manual submission to Blogpulse is required and creating a corporate or personal profile at Technorati will help significantly. The easy part of it ends here - that is what I have always told all corporate bloggers, not only our own customers.
You have to blog guys! It is a blog! It needs attention, or you can say – it is a company, it needs work, it needs attention and care. Debbie Weil says: “Corporations do not blog, individuals do”. I could not agree more. My interpretation with the same meaning for quite some time now has been: “It is up to the people in one company, the employees and owners that care, that have to get organized and blog, communicate and discuss with customers, vendors, and last but not the least - between themselves. The company will not blog, it is the people inside that will”. Debbie Weil has worded it better and more precisely.
So, in order to really use the company blog as a tool you have to blog, you have to share your thoughts, worries and achievements with the world. That is the key.
One of the first issues is to create company blog guidelines. Another step is to select a team within your company or hire professionals to do it for you. My personal opinion is that an insider will do a better and faster job while the “hired guns” will take some time to step up properly. On the other hand the hired pros will not need time to learn what a corporate blog is and how to keep it alive. The CEO or any other member of the management is good to blog but this is not obligatory. Quite often regular employees or PR and Marketing Department members would do a better job.
Once this is in place - get the hot topics off the charts and the business plan, get the initial customer feedback and start writing about it. I can not stop repeating that you have to blog often; you have to keep the blog alive. It will be a mistake if you just put text in there and post for the sake of the daily obligation. Blog wisely! Choose the topics properly and have your own opinion in there. I think that if 3-5 posts a week appear on your company blog per blogger – that will be something. Check blog statistics daily, most popular articles, most popular search terms, search engine links and visit durations – everything is important to properly monitor and direct the company blog.
Another important step is to have the company bloggers read and comment other people’s and companies' blogs. Identify yourself and your company blog to the world by making other people’s efforts and achievements worthwhile.
The content available in the Cyberspace is vast, the Blogosphere is growing rapidly. Content creation on your blog will not be important unless it is specific, focused, precise and has a personal touch.
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