Getting a corporate blog off the ground isn’t easy. Even though the technology is famous for being easy to launch and use, you still have to fight your way through a maze of IT policies, risk management practices, brand guidelines and internal trepidation. And once you’ve done all that, you have to plan your editorial, write it, get it approved, publish it and promote it. It sounds like a lot, I know. So, let’s make it even more menacing by listing it all out:
1. Select the technology
2. Gain business approval
3. Build or otherwise secure your IT environment
4. Gain IT approval
5. Design your theme
6. Get brand/marketing approval
7. Develop your editorial calendar
8. Get buy-in from your experts
9. Write
10. Write
11. Write
12. Write
13. Publish
14. Promote
Yep, that’s a pretty long list, and it isn’t even exhaustive. If you were to lay out a project plan for launching a corporate blog, it would dwarf the bulleted list you see above. What’s interesting is that most of it doesn’t have much to do with your core objectives around putting your brand and message in front of your market. In addition to incurring a considerable amount of overhead through design, build and implementation, you’ll wind up investing fairly heavily in promoting your corporate blog … a process that takes time to deliver returns.
So, what if you could accelerate this process?
It sounds pretty nice, I bet: bypass all the stuff that is foundational and get straight to pushing your message out to a large community of interested people. And, I’m sure you’re thinking that the Easter Bunny would be a great resource to have on this fantastic initiative.
Well, the reality is that being able to get right to message and brand isn’t as hard as you think. There are several ways you can do this in today’s social media market.
Have you been to The Huffington Post lately? How about Business Insider? These are two of the largest blogs on the web … and they accept contributions from just about everybody. It’s pretty easy to get set up with an account on either of these sites, as long as you’re a reasonably competent writer (think marketing writer, not necessarily journalist). They have large followings, and writing for a particular vertical (e.g., Business, Travel or Tech) can put your company’s message in front of your market (while also giving your brand broad exposure and heightened search engine visibility).
If your plan is to use content to market your company – the way you use placed bylined articles in trade publications, for example – engaging an existing mass market blog can put you in the game immediately with no incremental expense. You pitch for an account, learn how to use the platform, and start writing. This approach can be particularly effective for smaller businesses that aren’t interested in investing even a few thousand dollars in a custom WordPress theme and a premium hosting environment.
There are times, however, when it makes sense to have your own corporate blog. For larger companies, it makes sense to keep total control of the environment, to prevent downtime, decide whether or not to accept comments and place content for maximum visibility. You get none of this when you use an existing mass market blog as your primary means of communicating with the marketplace. Also, companies that want to wrap their content with their own branding and those that already have large, committed followings are better off with their own corporate blogs. But, it may make sense to syndicate to a larger mass media blog (we do this with IR magazine and Corporate Secretary, for example).
It looks like corporate blogging just got easier, especially for small businesses and big companies that are tangled in red tape. For the former, jumping onto an existing environment results in lower costs, a faster path to progress and an immediate audience. For the latter, it means thumbing your nose at the bureaucracy and getting into corporate blogging with no more effort than it takes to do basic PR.
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