Seven Reasons Your Company Should Be Blogging

By B.L. Ochman

Should your company blog?

No if you want to use a blog as a substitute for press releases and corporate BS. Yes, if you want to reap many other benefits. Here are seven good reasons to have a company blog.

1. Humanize your brand.
Blogs are an excellent touch point for human interaction with your customers. Nobody really cares what you say on your corporate site these days. We listen to what our friends - the ones we've met and the ones we've made online - say about your brand before we listen to you.

A blog offers brands a way to talk to people like a human, instead of in meaningless corporate speak. Blog about things people want to know, and not just what you want to tell them, and you can humanize your brand so people will want to talk to you.

Lionel Menchaca at Dell did a great job of humanizing a company that hadn't been listening or acting like humans for years. Read Now is Gone's post about Dell's turnaround

2. Establish Trust
If your company blog is conversational, actually helpful, possibly entertaining, open and honest about issues, then, over time, we'll come to trust you. And your brand will be thought of in more positive terms - HUMAN terms: the only ones that matter.

Being willing to listen is fundamental to blogging. Acknowledging complaints, compliments, and suggestions is what happens in social networks. Your readers will decide if you are worthy of trust - and that requires substantive participation, not just one-way preaching.

Link to and quote your sources. We know you're brilliant, but so are a lot of other people, and citing them is good ethics and good way to engage thought leaders who you found worth quoting.

Great rules of engagement from the US Airforce, via SocialMedia.com

Of course the devil is in the details, but the main principles of apply to everyone:
• Be factual
• Let trolls lie
• Make good content
• Link often to sources
• Focus on influencers

3. Generate leads
Hubspot Blog does a great job of that.
It's filled with really useful content, and it also offers downloadable free marketing tools, free training, and lots more lead generation tactics.

Because people don't keep coming back to you talking about yourself all the time on a blog any more than anywhere else.

4. Communicate frequently with your audience.
Seth Godin posts seven days a week. They're not all long posts. Some are just a couple of sentences. But he goes out of his way to make the content thought-provoking and helpful. And he's done it for years.

Shelly Palmer does the same in blog and video.

That's hard work. And not everyone can pull it off. But it pays off. big-time.

If people are listening to you because your blog is interesting, they'll know when you want to sell a book, a report, a course, a service, etc. And, since you'll already have a relationship with you, they'll be more willing to buy from you.

I'm not saying you need to post every day. I certainly don't. And I'm not saying I read every post by Seth or Shelly. But I'm glad they are there, reliably putting out excellent content.

5. Be recognized as an authority and source of exclusive news
Techcrunch - "dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies" - became a must-read for the tech world, and beyond, and Mashable - "the world's largest blog focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Media news" - is the bible of social media.

What news can your company offer that people will want to know?

6. Crisis communications
if your blog has helped you engage and converse with your audience, you'll have a group of loyal followers in place in the event of a crisis. And guess what? They'll cut you a break because they know and respect you.

7. Because blogging is fun

Bonus links:
- Fast Forward Blog, Bill Ives: The Fortune 500 Blogs On
- UMass Study: The Fortune 500 and Blogging: Slow and Steady
- What's Next Blog: 10 Reasons Your Company Shouldn't Blog
- What's Next Blog: How to have a totally fucking amazing corporate blog
-Read Write Web: How Blogging Has Changed Over the Past 3Years

Cartoon: Hugh Macleod

The difference as the controller of the medium (the blog) lies in our ability to connect and learn rather than just listen and wait. Interesting post BL. --Paul

Great post B.L - You make some interesting points. I totally agree that a corporate blog should be much more human than a normal website. It should be the place to find the people behind the brands.

True. Even when buying gadgets I always consult feedbacks from the net. It's always better to hear from an individual rather than a brand, especially those with honest opinions.

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Andy Michaels
http://www.andy-michaels.com/

But also it would seem important to benchmark the performance and ranking of one's blog against other fellow bloggers. How do I track my own progress? By extrapolating and making assumptions based on a sample of comments? Hmmm...And what tool is there to accurately track and benchmark blog popularity and related activity? One I am aware of is:

http://commetrics.com

Thanks to a blog, a blogger and a flurry of comments and a dialogue taken offline,I am aware of this web-based tool for tracking accurately how my blog ranks against my known competition.

Are there others? Would love to know.

To quantify and qualify is the key, seems to me.

Hmm, i agree with you but the most important for company is , no doubt, TRUST. So, maybe the second reason is the main one.

Great post.

Blogging is very important for a company. I agree with you 100% that having and maintaining a blog helps with being human and establishing trust.

This is a great post for us right now as we try to figure out what we're blogging about over at MemberHub.com. We have ideas but are looking to answer a few questions. One of which is the same question you have in #5.

Great list, with many seldom thought of ideas. I'd add one more: make sure your blog hooks people with easy-to-understand feeds to make them regulars.

I love blogging too and this is the best way to reach my desire market. Your post is very informative. Thank you for sharing this one.

Thanks so much for the reminders! I am a huge advocate for blogging, corporate or otherwise, and it's always helpful to be reminded of why we do it. The underlying principle of blogging? Keep them coming back. Continue to offer intelligent, thought provoking information. Show that you're actually human. The rest works out on it's own.

what a great post :)

blogging is like an informal way of reaching out to your customers. however, the information found in each entry should be useful for example a comprehensive product review. i've been using this technique together with a website set-up by Prova and results are overwhelming.