What can business blogging do for you?

What will a good blog offer your business?

A blog offers your business the opportunity to engage in and influence the online conversations that are going on about the stuff that matters to the business.

The logic is that these conversations are going on whether you like it or not. That’s what the web does. It gives everybody a mouthpiece (especially with blogging software!) and it interconnects, allowing other people to easily find those conversations and to join in.

So people can, will and depending on your organisation’s size possibly or probably do talk about you online.

Stake out your territory in this online conversation
Present your opinion, viewpoint and insights to the world
Share and contribute to the ever-growing online conversation/experience
Reap surprisingly substantial rewards

Examples of business blogs I read (and therefore think are good)

www.tompeters.com - example of how the individual can continually re-invent himself, sixty-something guru’s guru Tom Peters has a superb team blog
sethgodin.typepad.com- inventor of ‘viral marketing’, a key thinker and writer on this kinda stuff
www.blogmaverick.com - had never heard of this guy before stumbling across his blog one day; his outspoken views, use of blog as soap box and vibrant community following keep me coming back (and listening to HIS views)
www.englishcut.com - I wouldn’t know about this guy, this field, this whole world without this blog, but somehow I get enticed back from time to time
You go find some examples - type your passion or market and the word ‘blog’ into Google and see how you go…

What does a blog offer your business (in a ~~Financial~~ Marketing Director’s terms)?

Opportunity to lower communication barriers and foster useful, valuable dialogue between the upper echelons of your organisation and your important stakeholders like customers, staff, suppliers and investors by telling them what’s really going on in an authentic, credible tone of voice and inviting their response
Opportunity to enormously raise your organisation’s profile online, potentially way beyond scale, due to the extremely search engine-friendly nature of blogs and the mass-market, universally accessible global potential of the web
Opportunity to engage in, influence and contribute to crucial debates and opinions about your market, services, products and company brand, especially amongst the ‘early adopting’ opinion formers and key influencers
Opportunity to respond quickly to changes that affect your organisation in an extremely quick, low hassle, high technology way and distribute your response to the changes in environment
Opportunity to do all of this before (or better than) your competitors

What investments are required?

Of course the answer to this question depends on your chosen approach.

Starting small, an hour’s investment of your own time (or your delegated-to helper monkey servant) up front to get a free blog up and running. It’s easy and if you’re interested in this subject, you really should try it - if only as an experiment.

Clearly for the business creating a potentially high profile communications tool there should be some consideration of the company’s brand and how the blog will be perceived by its audiences.

To produce a professional, credible blog along the lines of some of the examples highlighted at the end of this article will require an investment in professional fees.

All of this aside, there is a further, and in many ways, much more important investment to be aware of.

The main investment in a good, successful, thriving blog is the time invested into content creation on an ongoing basis. This should not be invested. Thousands of people start blogs every week. Most of them quickly become static relics rather than ever-evolving regularly-visited hubs of communication.

If you are considering starting a business blog, be prepared to invest several hours (if not more) of the writer’s time per week. Good blogs have new, fresh, relevant content added to them regularly and keep in touch with the world that they relate to (be that gardening or hedge funds).

How can you quantify the return on investment?

As blogs and blogging evolve, so do good, sound ways of tracking their ROI, but some starter ideas include:

Measure ‘dialogue and engagement’ - comments left, contact forms completed, polls entered, websites linking to specific posts, user registrations
Web analytics - track in raw numerical terms the activity on the blog (unique visits, average visit length)
Sales - if relevant, you can set up your blog to start a journey that completes with the purchase of or enquiry for your product/service

Who should write your organisation’s blog?

A vital consideration.

When choosing who should be your company blogger take into account these factors:

Their time - how much they have
Their writing skills - or resources available to ghost write or edit their writing…
Their character! Woo hoo - we want REAL people.
Their passion quotient - they’ve gotta love it/live it/feel it
Their ability to make sound judgments - great blogs tell the truth, lasting blogs don’t burn bridges or contravene stock market or company rules!
Their involvement in what you do - ideally your blogger will be plugged in to all the key people, media, events, and general stuff going on in their/your world

Want us to talk to you more about a good business blog (and how we can deliver something compelling for you) please contact us now.

Will McInnes wrote this on 06.02.06 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Blogging, Business box