Corporate blogging is a huge subject so I’m going to start by assuming that your interest in corporate blogging is for external communication. Blogs for internal consumption are very valuable particularly in large companies but this blog is about online marketing so I’m going to ignore internal blogs in this post.
Blogs are Conversations
I don’t really like the term “corporate blogging”. Companies don’t blog, people do. Every post on your blog should be from a named person and should be written in the first person in a conversational tone. At work, most of us are a bit more formal in how we talk so a corporate blog should also be a bit more formal than a personal blog but it should still be clear that it’s been written by a human being.
It’s also vital that your blog software has good support for comments and trackbacks from other people’s blogs. Your blog is a conversation, not a speech, so you need to let your readers contribute.
Posting Frequency
There are successful blogs that survive with monthly posts but that is very unusual. Generally I’d advise blogging once or twice a week. It’s also a really good idea to blog on a schedule, such as every Tuesday or Friday. One of the blogs I read is published every Thursday and I look forward to it all week and I feel very let down when it’s not published for some reason.
However it is more important that the quality of your posts is high. If you really don’t have anything interesting to say then it’s better not to blog even if it does mess up your schedule.
Subject
If you work for General Motors or IBM then there probably are a lot of people interested in your company and you could get away with just blogging on your own news. However I’m pretty sure that if I was just blogging Brain Talent’s latest news then I’d have a readership in single figures but a blog about online marketing has much wider appeal.
The subject must relate to the business and interest the people that we want to have come to our website. It’s got to be something that is quite easy to write about and it’s always easier to write about something that interests you.
Technical
You can either host the blog yourself on your own website or you can put it on Blogger or WordPress. The advantage of external hosting is that it makes it clear that the blog isn’t part of your website and it can make it easier to write more openly.
The disadvantage is that a lot of the marketing benefit can be lost if you use an external site and it can be difficult to customise the blog exactly as you want it. My advice would be to host the site yourself.
My personal choice of blogging software is WordPress. It’s free, easy to install, easy to use and has got just about every feature you could want.
Great advise. I would remark that it’s more important to be consistent with your posts than worry about how often you post. If it is monthly, just be sure it’s every month!
The advantage of more posts to a corporation is more content – which is more content for search engines, which can help target more people.
If you’re a large corporation, I’d recommend getting a blog committee together – not to edit and control, but to ensure deadlines are met and strategies are discussed. I’d also recommend a corporate blogging platform such as Compendium Blogware.
Cheers!
Doug