Looking for bloggers on blogging in the enterprise

As background, along with

As background, along with the usual PR services, Baker Communications Group provides counsel and help with blog sites for our clients, which are technology companies including some based outside the U.S. where English is not their native language.

We suggest ideas and content for blog posts, do editing and some writing, suggest links to other blog sites and counsel on whether to use “moderation” or how to manage the blog. We work with our clients quite a bit on the tone of posts to help stay on the high road and avoid bashing competitors, while at the same time helping them to get your point across and offer perspective with as much of an educational tone as possible. Remember, people come to the blog to read and learn. Otherwise, it is a waste of time.

One of the best practices is to establish one person responsible for the blog, while creating an informal “review board” via an e-mail distribution within the company of people to preview posts and comment. These are not “approvers”; they serve as a sounding board and a sanity check and get a couple hours to respond. One of our clients determined this was a necessary step after a post to the blog that was considered inappropriate. The post was removed fairly quickly and this type “review board” process established as a checkpoint. Incidentally, there is a positive side-effect from this process, which serves as a “push” communication within the company and brings people into consensus on marketing messaging. One last point, the person picked with responsibility for the blog should ideally be someone with enthusiasm for the project who comes with a strong point-of-view.

Write with your future

Write with your future manager in mind. When you go on that job interview, do you want the interviewee to have read the entry?

Open your comments. Turning them off sends a message that you don't want to send to the blogosphere.

Post at least two to three times a week. You're not Bill Gates, Mark Cuban or some other hot shot that people check your blog every day to see if you wrote your first post in weeks.

All truth, all the time. Fib, exaggerate, promote... blog readers sniff it out and spread it leaving you with bad PR. If your company made a mistake, owe up to it -- don't ignore it.

READABLE! We've been hearing readability as a usability issue for years and it continues to be a problem. It needs to be readable in terms of font size, font color (gray doesn't cut it), and font style (don't dare use comic sans -- leave that for flyers and school newsletters. Use bold headers when an entry is long.

I'll stop here. I could go on for a while or repeat what y'all already said.

I manage the corporate blog

I manage the corporate blog the "ACA Guy" at http://acaguy.blogspot.com/ for Accellion http://www.accellion.com

I think one of the first elephant in the room to be tackled is how to write something meaningful for the reader without hinting at being a mindless drone overflowing with marketing-speak. This is really a political question that depends on your organization.

What I also find interesting however is how suspicious people are of blogs. Some warranted, but mostly not.

Finally, there is the Google angle for the blog (by Google I am really referring to the various methods that blogs can be researched). After all, what is the point of investing in a blog unless it shows up somewhere.

Well, it is a new media and we are all pioneers in this corporate/social experiment.

Warm regards, YFJ

i work with marty.

i work with marty. basically, our blog is pretty free spirited, not with many groundrules. employees are encouraged to blog but only a few of us have done so to date.

customers tell me all the time on the phone "i was reading your blog post" and it was either a general musings post, in which case they said it cracked them up, or a feature post, in which case they thanked me for breaking the news in the blog, aka as quickly as possible.

i agree with one of the earlier comments to "leave comments on". let people talk to you in your blog. let them even say bad things. a company that can accept public criticism with grace and dignity looks good to current customers and prospects.

for example, if your servers go down, first, proactively blog about it, apologize, explain what happened. second, expect people to comment about it as well. since you know they will comment about it, be proactive and be the first to broach the subject.

one of our lines of business is webcasting conferences on behalf of conference organizers or industry associations. so a lot of times i also blog from the conference to help drive traffic to the password protected conference multimedia sites (or, as we call them, events on-demand sites) that we create on behalf of our customers. it's where all the video, audio and speaker powerpoints go. here is an example from the Software and Information Industry Association Information Industry Summit

generally, this has helped drive traffic to the post-event multimedia web sites. blog postings are picked up pretty quickly by search engines and people find them.

in general, i personally am of the what you see is what you get school. i am me, not a corporate desk monkey and i don't play one in the business world. if someone looks at my outward appearance (sometimes bearded, sometimes in jeans) or my personal blog postings and doesn't want to do business with me as a result, it's probably for the better for both parties. if i resonate with you, that's fantastic and we can probably do some great things together. no worries either way though.

i think a lot of people appreciate that we as a company are who we are. we're bright, creative, and we can make our customers look really good to their customers, which is what counts. our blog is in line with who we are as a company.

and yes, eventually we will skin our blog. just as soon as we're done editing 800 hours of health care, web developer, publishing, education and software industry audio and video we captured last week in San Francisco...

As a blogger, you are part

As a blogger, you are part of the Internet's sensory system. If you have specific expertise or interests that you track, your posts and commentary on that subject become available to those who don't track that topic closely, but have occasional need to know what's going on.

So my advice is to plug your expertise in to the blogosphere, and make sure it is feedable and findable. The goodwill of your participation and the association with your area of expertise will accrue to both you and your company.

Our company blog -

Our company blog - blog.scribestudio.com is entirely unfiltered, and contains nothing but organic posts from our staff.

Sure, as a marketing guy I could propose that a post like this isn't exactly "on message" but the reality is that our blog is genuinely giving us a corporate voice - and it is revealing that we're actually human beings, working just like our customers, and we think and feel about things other than what we do to make money. It's refreshing.

It would seem that our raw and unfiltered blog is in fact a better marketing tool than I would have ever guessed - in fact, we find that the people reading our blogs are quite engaged with us and that's a great thing. It's a habit that needs to be nurtured and supported.

Things we've done (or not done, actually).
1. No rules. You can post about jobs we've done or something else.

2. No fake names. My name is actually Martin Focazio and the names of the posters on blog.scribestudio.com are all real.

3. Don't obsess. Our site is not "on brand" in terms of look and feel. We've talked about "skinning" it for months. But we're too busy working to bother. And it seems to not matter that much. When I re-launch our web site, we'll have a mure unified look and feel, but until then, we'll just keep using the basic dfault interface.

That's all I have to say on it. Thanks for reading.

Here are my five tips: 1.

Here are my five tips:

1. Get Buy-in From the Boss. Ask what is acceptable and stick with that. Don't violate any laws or standards.

2. Understand your Corporate Culture Some companies are just more open to new ideas than others, keep that in mind when blogging.

3. Your employees are probably already blogging or participating in social networking sites like MySpace at a personal level. So, if you are concerned about that, you should have a clear policy that spells out what will be tolerated when people blog or talk about the company in cyberspace.

4. If you have a corporate blog, turn on Comments and learn from them, even the most negative ones. If you are transparent and the negativity is unwarranted, your readers will stand up for you too, its happened to me so I know of what I speak. If you deserve the criticism, or it is a misunderstanding, you will have a chance to clear it up.

5. Blogging takes a lot of time, but don't let it compltely suck you in. Set a schedule and stick to it. For instance, blog in the AM, read and respond to comments before lunch, and again at the end of the day. Try to get into a rhythm, but be willing to change it in a crisis.

Here are some thoughts to

Here are some thoughts to get you all started.

• Read Blogs -- Read both popular blogs, as well as blogs in your specific industry. Learn how to find them using a variety of search tools besides Google.

• Don't accept blog advice from people that are not loggers!
• Get more focused in business blogging -- Read business blogging books, attend blogging conferences, join lbogging user groups, keep on blogging yourself.
• Find a champion if your voice is not loud, or a coach to sharpen your voice.
• Hire trustworthy employees who know how to interact with all levels of the customer base. Creating blog or podcast content are communication jobs, even when they involve technology.
• Be prepared for negativity. Develop thick skin, be prepared to respond to attacks, help to clarify the root issue and corporate commitment to resolving issues -- do so quickly and sincerely.
• Don't even think of building the blogging platform yourselves. Use open source software like WordPress.org or license Movable Type and customize it to your heart's content.

  Whichever software option you choose, set it up so the interface is intuitively easy to use for the marketers and executives who will be publishing to your company blogs.

• As far as corporate blog design, push hard to get the word "blog" incorporated into your basic site navigation on your overall Web pages. And be sure to recommend including prominent links on the blog to your company's Corporate Blogging Guidelines, to a Comments policy for readers visiting the blog and to key pages on your main Web site.
  
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We made a fictitious

We made a fictitious character "Bob Archer" who keeps a blog on interactive marketing. We created a site - www.meetbobarcher.com which any of our employees can add to. It helps define our company.