Keeping Corporate Blogs Updated and Relevant

By Christina | Posted December 17, 2008 | 0 Comment(s) | Filed in: Internet Marketing

You launched a blog for your business, or helped guide your corporate client into the blogosphere. Now weeks or months have passed, and your faced with the difficulties of keeping the content fresh and relevant.

Here are a few potential challenges and some simple solutions to help. You’ll find the most effective way to tackle these challenges is to share relevant, timely links that have interest to your target audience.

Audiences

You created your corporate blog to stay connected with your audience and capture new audiences. Now you are losing that connection or your blog is turning into a promotional vehicle. Or possibly you are having trouble attracting new readers and subscribers.

To connect or reconnect with your audiences, seek feedback and invite commentary on the blog, and see what readers are interested in.
To stay relevant, monitor and participate in the online communities, blogs and forums where your target audiences are active. This helps you get a feel for interests and keep a pulse on trends.
Understand your buyer personas. Buyer personas are profiles or biographies on distinct market segments (e.g. customers, prospects, mainstream media, bloggers) you plan to reach and influence. David Meerman Scott (author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR), believes buyer personas are a fundamental aspect of great marketing. Check out his full post on buyer personas.

Time

You created your corporate blog as a quick, simple communication tool to provide real-time news, updates and information to your audiences. Now it’s hard to find time in your schedule to post items, and stay updated on important news and trends.

Plan ahead by creating an editorial calendar of blog topics and schedule specific times for your posts each week.
Invite guest bloggers to share information and expertise.
Not every post has to be an earth-shattering revelation, or take hours of writing and research. Time is important to your readers too, so don’t be afraid to add shorter posts, and save your longer, thought-provoking entries for another time.
Use RSS feed readers for quick access to the important industry and social media channels that you monitor.

Content

You created your corporate blog to publish valuable content for your audiences. You’re an expert on your topic (that’s why you author the blog in the first place), but it can be a challenge to continually produce new and useful content.

The simplest and most effective blog post can be the sharing of valuable and relevant links. Link to news stories, other blog posts, resources, Websites and more. Add your insight and position to connect to your audience.
Consider linking to online tools, videos, photos, tips, ideas, and lists that have use to your audience, making sure to provide proper attribution to the sources.
Another great advantage is that by sharing timely information, you’re blog becomes a source of timely information that your audiences will value. It also connects you with influentials in your industry.

Corporate Blog With Caution

Josh Bernoff (VP of Forrester Research, co-author of Groundswell) gave some strong points on effective corporate blogging in his Dec. 9 post, “People don’t trust company blogs. What you should do about it.”

The post centers around a Forrester Research project from Q2 2008 on consumers trust of information sources such as personal email, traditional media, social media, and more, with corporate blogs recording the lowest trust levels at 16 percent of participants. Click here for the full post.

Bernoff believes that blogs created exclusively about companies and products are the possible causes of the low trust ratings.

Says Bernoff in the post, “If you want to be a thought leader and helper for your customers, and you blog frequently about those customers’ problems and solutions, then you can generate trust. This takes time and effort, but it will enhance your company’s reputation and it’s worth it…” He also states a few tips for corporate bloggers including that a blog “has to be more about your customers than it is about you,” and to “adjust your strategy based on your objectives.”

Blog Health Check

Unsure if your corporate blog is trusted by readers? Check out a great resource published by Jeremiah Owyang, senior analyst at Forrester Research, in his Dec. 10 post Health Check: How Trusted Is Your Corporate Blog? Owyang describes his methodology as a "very simple heuristic health check to gauge whether your corporate blog is going to be trusted by your readers."

What are some of the challenges you are facing with your corporate blog?

Christina Capadona-Schmitz is a PR 20/20 consultant, who has been with the Cleveland-based inbound marketing agency and PR firm since March 2006. She can be found on Twitter @christinacs.