So you think you might want to start a blog for your organization. Blogs can provide tremendous return, expanding your market awareness and automatically filling your sales pipeline. They can offer a creative outlet for your people, whether they are well-known industry figures or articulate but unknown CTOs. Interactions with readers can uncover potential product opportunities, test marketing concepts, or provide insight into competitive offerings.
It sounds like the decision to blog is obvious -- do it! But should you resist the temptation or sign up at Blogger or download a free version of Movable Type and start posting today? There are a variety of factors that will help you answer this most basic question. At innerbridge, we have worked on a variety of vendor blogging projects -- some that launched and some that never launched (for good reason). As a result, we can provide you some real world advice based on actual experience -- not based on theoretical do's and don'ts or arm's length research.
In this post, we will reduce the process to three steps. In reality, the process is more in-depth, but these steps should give you a sense of how to proceed. Obviously, steps 2-3 on apply in situations where going forward with a blog make sense. That said, here are the key steps, which we will detail in following sections:
- Identify why you want to blog, and, more importantly, what you intend to get from blogging
- Determine if you have the time, resources, energy, and will to blog effectively
- Plan to measure your effectiveness in order to justify, tweak, or shutter the blog
Step 1: Identify why you want to blog, and, more importantly, what you intend to get from blogging
What's behind your blogging needs or desires? Is it because you want to do the "Web 2.0 thing," or because your competitors have a blog? These are not good reasons to invest in a blog. Or is it because you feel your PR efforts aren't allowing you to maximize your market exposure; you want a new channel of communication with prospects, peers, analysts, etc.; and you want to help fill that ever-thirsty sales pipeline? Now you're onto something worthwhile. Exploring why you might blog won't determine whether you should -- initial, not-so-persuasive reasons may give way to valid, justifiable reasons -- but it is the first action to take. So, start with a list of the reasons to do it (later, in step 2 & 3, we will see if you can do it).
Once you have a list of why you have that blogging itch, the next thing to do is to analyze how those needs and desires match to business return. What do you hope the blog will deliver? Simply having a blog to keep up with the Jones, Inc. won't populate your SFA/CRM system with leads and drive sales. A shiny new blog with no coherent and reader-recognizable theme won't increase market awareness if readers are coming by to read posts about a developer's cats or an executive's California wine country odyssey.
To close out step one, which will determine if you even need to spend your time on the steps beyond, you need to iterate and polish your "why" and "what we get in return" lists, combine them, and create a solid, defensible, concise list of the justification for the blogging project.
An example of such a list might look as follows:
Acme Corp. Blogging Justifications
- The Acme blog is designed to increase readership among prospects; as a result, we will see an increase in sales leads
- The Acme blog is designed to increase our overall PR reach; as a result, direct blog readership, trackbacks, comments, and mentions of the blog in other media will lead to a greater organizational and product awareness
- The Acme blog will enable the market to better understand the technology and capabilities of our offerings; as a result, more qualified leads will enter the pipeline and the sales cycle will be reduced
Step 2: Determine if you have the time, resources, energy, and will to blog effectively
Once you have identified the business justifications for blogging, the next step is to figure out if you can actually do it.
- Understand why blogs are not effective. Even if a blog makes business sense and there is clear return, the effort can fail because of poor execution. To understand how to succeed, you need to know why most vendor blogs fail. The biggest reason for failure is lack of readership. Without readership, you can't generate leads and you can't create a vibrant, interactive community that cares enough to look for the next post. Readers don't come -- or leave -- a blog mainly because of issues around post timing (infrequent or inconsistent posts) and post quality (e.g., content that does not appeal to the readers, either in total or because each post is so different, or content that is obvious PR shovelware).
- Sketch out the blog architecture. Critical questions to understand are, for example, how many authors will the blog have? What is the blog's central theme? Will it deliver controversial posts that will engage the market, attract readers, and inspire feedback, or will it "play it safe" and adhere to the watered down, PR agency-approved company line? Will the posts be short and full of links to other content, or will they be drawn out and detailed, offering content and opinion not available anywhere else? Will there be graphics, or is it just about text (graphics add more time to the post process outlined below)? Will the blog look like or even be part of the corporate site, or will it have its own identity? Will the blog have advertising? Will you encourage feedback (comments)? These are just some of many questions you should answer.
The answers will enable you to map the process and determine resource needs. - Map out a process for managing the blog. To blog effectively, you need to not only manage an editorial calendar to ensure consistent and timely content, but you need to outline the content creation process (e.g., are the author's on their own, or do they get help working on ideas), determine how the editing process (e.g., how will you handle group edits for content and nit-picky edits for grammar, spelling, etc.) will work and how you will respond to comments (e.g., comment moderation, as well as author replies to feedback). Also, how will you publicize the blog (i.e., let it grow organically, promote it via your usual PR methods, astroturf other media and blog sites, etc)? And what is your measurement plan (see below for more on the topic)?
innerbridge often ends up running this part of the process because many companies don't have the resources or desire to do it internally, and using an external provider also enables the company to cap the blog cost. - Recheck whether there is an internal will to publish engaging content. At this point, with a basic look and feel of the blog and process map determined, it's time to go back to the management team and ask, once again, are they willing to allow potentially controversial posts. In addition, are they ready for controversial or negative feedback from readers? Obviously, profanity, ad hominem (personal) attacks, and unrelated comments aren't going to be allowed, but what about feedback that logically and with evidence takes on the company position or product? The effectiveness of the project can hinge on the type of content (posts and feedback) that are allowed, as readers will quickly abandon ship if they feel the blog is to constrained.
A final thought on this subject: Even if you get buy in, expect some internal contention when those first controversial posts generate a wave of negative feedback! And remember, readers that provide feedback are almost always on the extreme sides of an issue, and negative feedback outnumbers digital pats on the back.
Step 3: Plan to measure your progress in order to justify, tweak, or shutter the blog
Building a blog and then ignoring it will defeat its purpose. You need to be able to measure overall readership (visitors and subscriptions), feedback, and the contribution of the blog to the sales pipeline. Free tools like Google Analytics and the auto-generated code that can be inserted in blog pages to track readership are an easy and low-cost way (the cost being time) to determine the success of the effort. For RSS subscription tracking, FeedBurner is another easy and free tool.
Popular metrics and measurements include:
- Weekly or monthly measurement of readers and feedback.
- Reports on posts, both timeliness and popularity.
- Action plans for "hot" posts, posts that generate an abnormally large volume of readers or feedback.
- Comparisons of primary site traffic and blog traffic.
- Comparisons of lead generation and blog popularity.
Final thoughts
This post is just an overview of the process of deciding to and than implementing and measuring a vendor blog. You can also read about the topic in a New Rowley research note (read about it here). If you have questions or comments, let us know.
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