“Step one – you find a girl to love”
Posted by robertford on November 22, 2008
Whenever I hear any reference to plans with a number of steps in them, I can’t help but hear Eddie Cochran’s voice in my head, singing the first of his Three Steps to Heaven (actually, as a Brit who grew up in the 70’s, it’s Showaddywaddy’s version that I hear, but that’s by the by).
As promised, over the next few weeks, I’m going to be drilling down into each of the tools that Peter Kim identified in his 22 Step Social Media Marketing Plan, giving more details on the tool itself, links to good reference materials, and some more examples.
Starting at the beginning (which as Julie Andrews told us, “is a very good place to start”), we’re going to look at blogging. Turning to that font of all knowledge, Wikipedia, we find the following definition – “A blog (a contraction of the term “Web log”) is a web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video“. Reading on a little further, the definition for corporate blogs as “blogs, either used internally to enhance the communication and culture in a corporation or externally for marketing, branding or public relations purposes“.
So, focusing on corporate blogs used externally for marketing, branding or public relations purposes, let’s did a little deeper. In a report published in 2007, Forrester reported that “46% of US companies have or are considering blogs”, while Universal McCann reported that “33.2% of US adult population age 16-54 read blogs and 14.5% write them”. I don’t know about you, but I think that if the word “active” had been included, those figures would have been a lot lower. The blogosphere is littered with abandoned blogs (see below), and while that might not be important for personal blogs, what sort of message is it sending to company’s stakeholders (i.e. customers, business partners, vendors, employees, community) find that the blog that was supposed to be serving their needs, gets shuttered up or disappears. Remember, as we approach this Holiday season, just like puppies, blogs are for life, not just for Christmas.
As I discussed in my last post, there’s a lot of incredible infromation freely available on the web, and when it comes to ‘Blogging 101′, I’d suggest that you take a look at a social media & blogging 101 workshop that Susan Getgood gave at the SOCAP (Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals in Business) International Symposium, earlier this year.
In particular, read pages 33 – 48, which covers some of the benefits of a corporate blog (e.g. Building community, Establishing expertise, Humanizing your company), and a step-by-step plan (6 steps, this time) for building a blog. One of the key takeaways for me comes on chart 46 (and maybe this is why so many blogs have been abandoned. A blog ONLY makes sense IF it supports your overall business plan AND you are comfortable with publicly engaging with your stakeholders.
Remember that a blog is a two-way conversation, and you may hear things that you don’t like or be drawn into topics that you might not want to discuss. Before you think “oh, that’s not for me”, I’ll leave you with one more thought. Just because you don’t want to engage in those conversations, doesn’t mean that they won’t happen in your absence. As an exercise (go on, humor me), just try appending ’sucks’ or ‘-sucks’ onto some of your favorite corporate websites, and see the types of conversations going on there.
