So much more than just a blog…?
You might (or might not) have noticed our shiny new teaser promos at the bottom of our homepage – we thought they deserved a bit of explanation.
So what does ‘So much more than just a blog’ really mean? We felt that the humble blog, sometimes overlooked when people talk about social media strategy, was worthy of a bit more love.
After all, when you can set up a WordPress blog for free, in minutes, why would you invest thousands of pounds, plus your team’s time and energy, in getting us to build it for you?
For starters, a blog isn’t just a blog, it ’s a platform for conversations with your audience, often the first that any company considers embarking on. It’s also a content distribution platform, allowing you to disseminate your voice out into the social web, reaching your audience wherever they already are.
WordPress, and ExpressionEngine – the platforms we know inside out, aren’t simply blogging platforms either – given the right know-how, they’re an engine that can drive fully-fledged socially-enabled sites, without the need for a ground-up development process that takes six months or more.
What’s even more important to recognise is that if your company decides to take that first step into the social space with a blog, everyone has to be comfortable with opening themselves up to their audience.
For a start, it’s got to reflect your brand. We spend a lot of time understanding the personality and visual identity of a brand. We carefully meld it to take into account it will become a shared space, for conversations between you and your audience. It’s not the same as an old-school push marketing website, it’s got to have an identity of its own, and be a place where people feel comfortable talking.
But there’s also the question of being comfortable with just the idea of opening yourself up to comment.
Understandably, there’s still a degree of reticence within some companies in starting those conversations. We run workshops with all our clients to understand how their processes work, bringing in legal, marketing, PR and anyone who has a stake in how the brand is perceived online.
It’s an exercise in understanding everyone’s needs and objectives, as well as the things that make them start chewing their fingernails and turning grey.
Only once we understand these things can we deliver something that everyone embraces, and stands a good chance of success without internal pressures constraining the conversation.
And success is a key consideration when we’re scoping a blog – it would be all too easy (and heartbreaking for us) to put together a beautiful new blog and hand it over, only to see it stagnate.
It’s important to remember a blog is a container for its content – and unless that content is compelling, relevant and useful to your audience, it’s not going to gain the traction it needs to be successful.
Before we’ve even launched a blog, we spend time working closely with our clients to create content plans. We help you carefully consider why you’re launching a blog, everything you might have to talk about over the next 12 months and what your audience is going to find engaging.
This is a vital part of launching any website, but too often overlooked when it comes to blogs – it’s easy to concentrate on the build without looking further into why people will want to actually take part.
We also help create moderation guidelines that don’t stifle conversations but make sure that some of the more sensitive internal stakeholders, like legal and PR, feel like this blog will be a great opportunity, not a liability.
Looking back over this post, which I’ve made as short as I can without missing too much out, I think the length probably shows how much more than ‘just a blog’ a NixonMcInnes blog really is.
If you’re thinking of launching a blog or community website for your company, why not get in touch?
*Thanks to Flickr user donjd2 for use of the image.
Max St John wrote this on 16.06.09 – 2 comments
It's filed in the NixonMcInnes box
On June 16th, 2009 at 3:17 pm, Ross responded:
For me, the attraction of blogs is that they’re brilliantly adaptable. Once you’ve decided upon a goal, and given people the empowerment necessary, there is no end to a blog’s versatility. A great example for me is the Sodexo careers blog:
http://sodexocareers.blogspot.com/
This doesn’t replace the careers site, or upstage their successful Twitter feed, but adds depth to their employer brand, and gives the recruitment/HR team a platform to share news, stories and most importantly personality with their target market. Lovely stuff.
On June 29th, 2009 at 8:02 am, links for 2009-06-29 « Where is my towel? responded:
[...] So much more than just a blog…? @ NixonMcInnes: Social media goodness. Translated. Created. Delive… Considerations about your blog. There is more than software, content and traffic… (tags: weblogs howto *****) [...]