So, you’ve got a business blog. Who cares?
Nett Administrator
15 April 2008
15 April 2008
Start a company blog, great idea. Gets the word out about your company and establishes you as an expert. Or does it? Peter Bray looks across the windswept plains of poorly planned corporate blogging. Cue tumbleweed.
I see a lot of businesses undertake what I call vanity projects on the web. I know the principle of advertising can be thought of as ‘sell them the dream, give them the truth’, but there is far too much meaningless rubbish on company
websites.
There’s McDonalds’ Vice President, Bob Langert, who writes a blog on corporate social
responsibility that is pure PR. Or The Guardian website
which, despite the
publication’s long and respected history is, quite frankly, poorly written drivel.
which, despite the
publication’s long and respected history is, quite frankly, poorly written drivel. Many corporate websites post pointless talking-head videos of their CEOs, ‘About Us’ sections that fail to tell you anything, or overblown and unsupported case studies. The prime suspect in this gang of web blunderers is more often than not the
company blog. I have a message for Mr or Ms CEO: most of your potential clients have no interest at all in your opinions.
Here is the usual life cycle of the company blog. An agency decides it can capitalise on the Web2.0 trend by selling an element of Web2.0, such as blogging, to a client.
Once the marketing manager has been convinced a blog will give the brand further innovative positioning, someone has to be found in the company to write it. They realise the risks inherent in a blog, so figure the only way to cover their butts
is to have the big boss write it. The big boss thinks it’s a great idea and churns out a couple of blog entries in the first week, typically mixing a few snippets of personal interest with corporate gloss. The blog then generates a few comments,
typically from That Guy in the IT Department who No One Talks To.
"There are literally millions of blogs, but try naming 10 good corporate ones."
The following week the boss is a bit busier, so fewer entries get written. The week after, fewer still entries get written. Within a month, the blog is lucky to be getting any new entries at all.
Sound familiar? Ever been to a blog that hasn’t been updated for a while? Nothing looks worse. Well, apart from a chat room where you have to talk to yourself. If you are seriously considering creating a company blog, I have just two words for
you: please don’t.
There are literally millions of blogs, but try naming 10 good corporate ones. The old joke about this is that the bloggers outnumber the people that read them.
The reality is that people don’t care as much about our opinions as we think they do. Too often, business owners believe that in order to sell products or services, they should be positioned as central to a consumer’s lifestyle. Wrong!
We don’t need to establish a bond between consumers and our products and services, we simply need to give them the information they want to make their own purchasing decisions. Just because (from our corporate perspective) we think something is
important doesn’t mean that our customers actually want this information.
The great thing about Web2.0 is that it gives consumers the ability to interpret and mash up brands to suit their own agenda. Never before have business owners had such little control over how they are perceived.
This is a superb opportunity. Create the tools for your users to communicate what they want, and your brand awareness will increase. Let them make up their own minds as to the merits of what you offer.
Speak simply, listen intently and loyalty, sales and customer satisfaction will increase. And without a blogging CEO in sight. #
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In your experience, when is having a blog appropriate then?
How can companies run successful blogs?
I have just visited an excellent example of a great business blog.
www.viget.com/blog
They actually have 4 different blogs for each discipline of the company. Very good content.
Fair point. But don't you think Blogs offer a good way for customers to tell companies what they want?
You have to start the conversation somewhere, and a well written blog is a good way to trigger feedback from customers.
The problew with many corporate blogs is that the companies starting them don't fully understand how web 2.0 works. They still think it is like advertising and the converation is one-way. The other problem is that the CEO or any other big nabob are the worst people to write blogs, for many reasons. they don't have the time, they can't write well and they have the wrong mind-set. I can see more and more companies hiring social media officers.
While I agree that many company blogs are little more than vanity projects, especially those produced by larger organisations, I think Peter Bray's critique is a little too sweeping.
Blogs can be useful to smaller companies, especially those in services industries or consultancy, in helping to build their profiles. They may not generate business directly this way but they can give prospective customers a better (and hopefully positive) picture of the company and its business culture than many other forms of promotion.
This is provided these blogs are well-written and kept up to date - and I agree that the work involved in doing this is often underestimated.. I also agree with Gary Chow's comment that a key problem is that many companies fail to understand how web 2.0 works and that CEOs, especially in larger companies, are often the wrong people to be writing company blogs.
Finally I am extremely puzzled by Bray's refererence to the Guardian website, for a number of reasons. First, this is not by any means a company blog in the same way that, say, the McDonald's VP blog is. The Guardian like most other media organisations increasingly uses the internet to deliver content and to call its website a blog is as about as silly as calling the Sydney Morning Herald a newsletter.
Second, while I assume there are some online-specific writers and columnists, this content is largely written by the same journalists who prepare the print edition. On the whole I find this material, prepared by 100s of people, to be no better or worse than the websites of other major news organisations - yes, there are some silly and trivial articles and others which reflect the paper's leftist heritage, but there is also high-quality journalism as well.
In calling all this material "poorly written drivel", either Peter Bray is saying he dislikes the lot - in which case one could suspect that there might be a political agenda behind his comments, or he's condemned the lot because of a poorly written movie or book review. If there is more substance behind his comments then Mr Bray should elaborate.