How to run a successful corporate blog

There is an interesting article at Reputationonline by Stephen Waddington. The premise of the article centres around the poor delivery of UK corporate blogs, which is in sharp contrast to US corporate blogs. Having played around with blogs since around 2000, I have some very simple observations to make in this debate:

1. Blogging is hard (in the sense of doing it to best effect) and hard work (in the sense of delivering good quality posts day after day).

2. In my experience many companies have set up a blog without the first clue of what they plan to use it for. Which is never a good way to go about anything.

3. Many companies that do offer regular content, completely ignore the fact that people simply won’t bother to read it (or link to it) unless the content is interesting. So corporate centric pronouncements on new management appointments are going to have very little resonance with anybody.

4. The staying power of many UK companies is incredibly limited. A well known saying in the blogging community goes along the lines of “the point at which you feel you want to give up on blogging, is always the point your blog is about to take off”. I have encountered this many times myself, with the “mid blog crisis” usually coming around the 6-12 month mark. In almost every instance I have persevered and been rewarded with traffic, links and a degree of recognition in my chosen niche.

5. Many companies do not fully understand the benefits of blogging. Ok they might think it’s possibly helpful in a nebulous SEO context - although in my experience that is still a rarity. But in terms of things like: online reputation management, internal link structure, long tail keyword targeting and improved crawling rate of search engine spiders (amongst many other things) - corporate awareness is patchy at best.

So there you go. The UK corporate community is generally pants at blogging and the above gives you some reasons why. But there is hope:

My solutions for better corporate blogging

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Exciting times ahead with a new client - The Luxury Network

Continuing our new business drive into the luxury space, we’re very pleased to announce one of our most exciting wins to date.

Representing and connecting over 130 of the World’s most iconic luxury brands, The Luxury Network is the most cherished luxury affinity marketing brand on the planet.

Our tasks are to develop a social media marketing strategy with the group’s founders, focussed on:

1. Seeking out and attracting potential franchisees all over the World
2. Providing ongoing support and social media knowledge to the global franchisee network
3. Assisting and representing some of the 130 global luxury brands position their brands effectively using social media
4. Managing the online reputation for the entire network
5. Promoting awareness online around the values of The Luxury Network

To say we’re excited about this opportunity is an understatement. We’ll be keeping you abreast of the developments within the group so watch this space.

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Ten ways a hotel should use social media for marketing

We don’t need to tell you that social media has taken hold of the net and isn’t about to let go, that’s old news. What we do need to tell you is that social media holds the key to new bookings perhaps more than you think.

Here are our top 10 ideas for embracing social media as a hotel:

1 – The twitter concierge service. Set up a twitter page and encourage visitors to your website (through a link) to ask questions and get immediate responses through twitter. Hyatt have done this very successfully.

2 – Share your positive reviews. Post your positive reviews to your blog and set up a twitterfeed so as you also automatically disperse them through twitter and Facebook.

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Online PR embraces blogging - 10 years too late!

The blog Herald recently wrote about UK PR’s slowly coming to terms with blogging.
Wow, better late than never I guess!!!

It has always amazed me how much PR’s have buried their heads in the sand as far as digital media is concerned. Whilst measures are being taken to correct this approach, I still have a little chuckle when I hear that a struggling PR company has opened up a digital division (with great fanfare) in a belated attempt to get on the bandwagon.

Look under the hood a little, and this either turns out to be someone (desperate to save their job) over projecting their skills within the company and being offered the digital role or it’s a spotty intern straight from school who “gets” social media - umm a recipe for disaster I think - example Habitat’s awful attempts to garner exposure on Twitter using Iran related hashtags.

There are some harsh facts here:

1. Most conventional PR’s are going to find it hard going in the digital world. Example, I was training a PR lady in digital media and she said to me “this is so complicated, how I yearn for the days of picking up the phone and getting coverage in the Times or Independent”. In my experience this is the prevailing sentiment within the PR industry.

2. Generalistion here but most PR’s aren’t technical. Fact. The brave new digital world requires an understanding of how blogs work, how social media works, how SEO works, how analytics work and how this all works together. Plus it’s a moving target with new technology changing the rules everyday. Staying on top of this for your average PR is daunting to say the least.

3. The result of this is that alot of PR companies and PR employees are doomed. The inexorable shift of PR and marketing spend online will leave many old style PR’s high and dry.

And out of the ashes a new PR industry will evolve.

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Why do most blogs fail?

Technorati carried out some research in 2008 that showed that only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That means to 95 percent of blogs are essentially being abandoned and left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of an unfulfilled dream.

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