I am on a panel at the upcoming New Communications Forum in Las Vegas March 7-9. The event is looking strong, and if you want to understand about social media and business, I would suggest you sign up before it sells out. My panel is headed by VOCE Communications' Mike Manuel, who we profiled in Naked Conversations as one of the "publicists who get it."
Mike has asked each of the panelists to list their favorite best practices in company blogging. I'm not sure a tactic becomes a best practice until it becomes tried and true over the years, and we have not yet had that many years. But some tips for business blogging have proved pretty trustworthy already and other tactics, such as character blogs have been pretty well established as lame.
Over the years, I've probably written more than 100 blogging tips, including (with Scoble) an entire chapter in Naked Conversations called "Doing it Right." Many of them have become blatantly obvious. So, in preparation for the conference I tried to forge a few new ones. Please let me know what you think of them:
1. Humanize. Remember that one fundamental reason for blogging is the humanization of the corporation. Be a real person when you blog. Reveal the passion you feel for your job. Let readers see and feel your personal fallibility and, above all, do not fall into the abyss of mediocrity, where so many corporate blogs have fallen.
2. Serve your reader more than your employer. This is a fundamental success strategy. The more generous you are to your readers, the more influential you will be. Send people away from your site through links to competitors whenever it will benefit them. You may lose a sale, but you will likely gain a trusting customer.
3. Join conversations before you start new ones. People are already talking about the issues they care the most about. Read what they have to say, then add value to the existing conversation by saying something new whenever you can. When you start your own new conversation, you will have established your own credibility. Too many enterprise bloggers are too me-centric. They start a conversation and want to know where their readers are. If people do not know who you are and where you are coming from, it's very much like starting to talk make a speech wile riding with strangers on a subway car. Even if what you say is valuable and interesting, people will do their best to ignore you. They are also likely to mistrust you.
4. Keep each blog to one topic. There is power in simply focusing.
5. Your blog is about your personal brand. The more company representatives who have strong personal brand, the more powerful the corporate brand becomes.
