The Soci­ety for New Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Research solicited cap­sule sum­maries of cor­po­rate blog­ging best prac­tices offered by some of its mem­bers, who are among the top social media con­sul­tants in the country.

Shel Israel
Author, Twit­ter­ville, co-author, Naked Con­ver­sa­tions

Human­ize: Remem­ber that one fun­da­men­tal rea­son for blog­ging is the human­iza­tion of the cor­po­ra­tion. Be a real per­son when you blog. Show your­self doing a job that you have some pas­sion for. Show your fal­li­bil­ity and, above all, do not fall into the trap of medi­oc­rity, where so many cor­po­rate blogs wind up.

Serve your reader more than your employer: This is a 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 when appro­pri­ate. You may lose the sale, but in the long run you will gain a loyal customer.

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 and add value to the exist­ing con­ver­sa­tion. Then when you start a new con­ver­sa­tion, you will already have cred­i­bil­ity and trust. If you try to ini­ti­ate a con­ver­sa­tion and peo­ple don’t know who you are or where you are com­ing from, then they will either ignore you or mis­trust you.

John Cass
Author, Strate­gies and Tools for Cor­po­rate Blogging

Com­ment­ing: Cor­po­rate blog­ging is not just about the con­tent on your site, it’s also about par­tic­i­pat­ing in con­ver­sa­tions on other blogs. Respond to com­ments on your blog, and also com­ment on other blogs. These con­ver­sa­tions can be just as impor­tant as build­ing rela­tion­ships with peo­ple on your own site and estab­lish­ing your rep­u­ta­tion in your community.

Track­ing con­ver­sa­tions: Track­ing con­ver­sa­tions on other blogs is one of the most dif­fi­cult aspects of blog­ging. For­tu­nately there are now tech­nolo­gies that enable you to track con­ver­sa­tions. These include coCom­ment, deli­cious, Co.mments and Com­ment­ful.

Per­son­al­iza­tion: Per­son­al­iza­tion is impor­tant in writ­ing a blog, as blogs pro­vide employ­ees the chance to break down some of the bar­ri­ers that exist between cus­tomers and com­pa­nies. The infor­mal style of writ­ing that is pos­si­ble in a blog can help reach cus­tomers who would not pay atten­tion to a company’s state­ments otherwise.

Deb­bie Weil
Social media con­sul­tant, Author, The Cor­po­rate Blog­ging Book

Use it or lose It: If you’ve got a cor­po­rate blog, use it! Case in point, after a whop­per win­ter storm Jet Blue had hun­dreds of angry cus­tomers camp­ing out at JFK air­port and trapped inside planes on the tar­mac. Instead of post­ing a sin­cere “I’m sorry” to his cor­po­rate blog, CEO David Neele­man said noth­ing. He did speak to the press and was quoted widely, but his blog hadn’t been updated in weeks.

Update: I FedExed a signed copy of The Cor­po­rate Blog­ging Book to Neeleman’s office. Within 24 hours, his staff called to thank me and updated his blog with two new entries. Sub­ti­tle for this best prac­tice: In a Cri­sis, Lis­ten Online As Well As Offline.

Just do it: Don’t put blog­ging on your list of to-do’s. C’mon guys. It takes hours — not months — to cre­ate a blog. Start inter­nally to give your­self time to develop a cred­i­ble, com­pelling blog­ging voice. Round up a multi-author team of blog­gers. In other words, use a “Leap, Then Look” strat­egy to get started.

Don’t obsess over your ROB (Return on Blog­ging): Although you can use prox­ies to mea­sure the ROI of a cor­po­rate blog in dol­lars, the real­ity is that a cor­po­rate blog is still a soft mar­ket­ing strat­egy. It’s many things: a direct, real-time con­duit to cus­tomers, a con­ver­sa­tion with cus­tomers, a brand enhancer (if you exe­cute well), a way to improve search engine rank­ings, a way to get media atten­tion, etc. These will ulti­mately trans­late to the bot­tom line even if there isn’t an exact calculation.

Gio­vanni Rodriguez
Co-founder, The Con­ver­sa­tion Group

Inno­vate: Too many busi­nesses are adopt­ing cookie-cutter, tem­plate approaches to social media. The best are dig­ging deep and invent­ing new and com­pelling ways to engage with their cus­tomers, part­ners and employees.

Inte­grate: The con­ver­gence of all the dig­i­tal tools that com­prise social media are mak­ing some com­pa­nies think about the long-term effects on infor­ma­tion man­age­ment. Inte­grate with the IT team to incor­po­rate and sup­port with other Web 2.0 tools. One trend to watch: inte­grated, social-media hubs that will replace or aug­ment intranets and extranets.

Scale: Whether yours is a small or large orga­ni­za­tion, you need to under­stand that social media is a tool for every­one, not just the offi­cial spokes­peo­ple or the PR team. Smart com­pa­nies that under­stand this (e.g., IBM) are turn­ing their busi­nesses into “com­mu­ni­ties of communicators.

Josh Hal­lett
Social media con­sul­tant, Hyku

Read/research: Before you start to blog, spend time read­ing other blogs. Research blogs in your area of inter­est to learn more about the con­tent and cul­ture (both of these are equally important).

Trial blog writ­ing: If you plan to launch a blog soon, start writ­ing now in the back­ground (sort of a blog-in-training). This will get you in the habit of writ­ing posts on a fre­quent basis and allow you to develop your voice/theme before you go live. If you can’t keep up with post­ing now, how will things change once you launch your real blog?

Own your content’s future: Make sure you own the domain name and future devel­op­ment path of your blog. Too many orga­ni­za­tions start with a free or low-cost ser­vice and don’t own their domain name, i.e., corporateblog.typepad.com. Spend the lit­tle bit of time and money it takes to con­trol your domain and content.

Mike Manuel
Social media strate­gist, Voce Com­mu­ni­ca­tions

Cor­po­rate blogs require a ton of time and atten­tion: Under­es­ti­mat­ing the amount of time, energy and com­mit­ment required to main­tain a healthy blog is a com­mon mis­take com­pa­nies make.

Every blog should have at least one inter­nal cham­pion who sees to the reg­u­lar care and feed­ing of the blog and ensures that a steady mix of insight, access and per­spec­tive is offered back to its read­ers. Increas­ingly, I believe cor­po­rate blogs, espe­cially those for large com­pa­nies, require a ded­i­cated, full-time person.

Cor­po­rate blogs should place equal empha­sis on posts and com­ments: Too often, com­pa­nies focus so much energy and effort on writ­ing blog posts that they neglect the impor­tance of actively watch­ing and respond­ing to blog com­ments. I think the dif­fer­ence between a good blog and a great blog has less to do with the value, tone and fre­quency of posts and a lot to do with how an orga­ni­za­tion demon­strates it is lis­ten­ing, reflect­ing and address­ing related dis­cus­sions. More often than not, I think this begins by sim­ply pay­ing atten­tion to blog comments.

Cor­po­rate blogs extend offline: A great cor­po­rate blog is one that’s capa­ble of fos­ter­ing and cul­ti­vat­ing con­nec­tions online that then man­i­fest and grow offline. Some­times it’s sim­ply the spread­ing of an idea offline via a com­mu­nity of read­ers that share a com­mon point of view. Other times it’s actu­ally meet­ing with mem­bers of this com­mu­nity who have come to know and under­stand the peo­ple behind an orga­ni­za­tion through its blog and their con­tri­bu­tions to it.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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