Vendor blogging initiatives offer great reward, but a project can stumble when facing the inevitable challenges of creating and approving content and reacting to feedback criticisms. These issues should not and do not need to derail an otherwise successful effort, but internal project champions should be ready to identify the problems as they emerge and have a ready-made strategy for dealing with them.
In this post, we will examine some of the issues that we have seen arise as part of vendor blogging, look at ways to easily spot and try and mitigate these issues, and, finally, we will talk about the role of third parties, such as innerbridge, in providing a blog management service that can reduce the likelihood and impact of these issues.
[See this previous post for the steps to launch a blog.]
A look at some blog realities
The most critical issues we have seen emerge in the post-launch phase of a vendor blog include:
- Dealing with negative feedback. The blog was originally greenlighted to help the organization, but sometimes posts can seem to deliver the opposite effect. A seemingly innocuous or well reasoned post may generate an unexpected wave of negative comments. The reality is that there will always be negative feedback -- usually negative comments outnumber any positive comments. In a common situation of 20-to-1 (in terms of readers to feedback), often most of that feedback will be critical.
For executives, negative publicity can seem to outweigh the value of the blog, particularly since it is non-traditional form of PR without years of acceptance. The blog champion often has to then manage the irate or concerned executive while trying to preserve the essence of the blog. - Controversial posts get more readers. A post with a respected author that is controversial will get the most readers, the most feedback, and the most exposure. A well-known industry luminary can get away with few details and words and a heavy dose of opinion. And his or her force of personality and history can lead to a major reader reaction.
The challenge for blog champions is that while controversy drives readership, it also drives executive concern (see the first bullet). The organization needs to understand the dilemma. Controversial posts will increase the impact of the blog, but they may also create enough internal unease to significantly author the style and tone of future posts. - Many authors burn out. Contributor burnout occurs most often because the authors are a) not driven, prolific writers, and b) because the most worthwhile posts they have written most likely were somewhat controversial. The internal, executive backlash has taught contributors that gaining readers and generating feedback is not often valued over playing it safe.
Blog champions need to recognize contributor fatigue, which is most obvious in terms of posts, but can also be seen in terms of post topic contributions. First and foremost is to identify trends, and the second is to identify remedies. We will deal with both below.
To do's: Tracking, understanding, and revisiting
We discussed some issues above and examined how a blog champion could identify and begin to address them. In this section, we will spend some time on specifically actions the internal blog champion and the team can do to overcome the hurdles. Actions include:
- Tracking post ideas from cradle to grave. It is critical to not only know what has been published, but what topics have been contemplated or abandoned. Blog champions need to see what topics were tried, and importantly, which were rejected. The pattern will enable the team to understand where an author' passion or the groups' passion lies (based off the number of topic suggestions) and where the reality of the blog, at least in terms of the executive sponsors, lies (the type and topics of published posts). For just this purpose, innerbridge has developed a comprehensive blog management tool. Organizations need to work with a third-party provider with such a tool or build their own. A simple spreadsheet or Word doc will quickly become unusable, or, in many cases, hopelessly out of date.
- Understanding popular and unpopular posts. As mentioned above, controversy always generates readers both on site and at other blog and community sites. Benchmarks or product comparisons will reliably generate traffic, but most likely, since it is controversial, it will bring out all the negative commenters. As with tracking ideas, the organization needs to understand the popularity of posts by post type or post content categories. Sometimes, non-controversial posts will generate a strong response simply because it meshes exactly with the readership's interests. Post popularity should not be a guiding influence, but it is a valuable point for understanding if current reader and organizational markets are in sync.
- Revisiting the goal of the blogging effort. One of the first stages in the blog process is to identify why to blog -- why spend the time and invest the resources? Over time, as the readership grows but some controversial posts spook more conservative executives, the enthusiasm or support can wane, leaving the blog champion to choose between his or her goals and those of his bosses. It's important to keep the short description and goals of the blog in a form of "live document" that can reflect that original and than enhanced goals. Skeptical executives that are nervous because of feedback -- no matter how small in terms of overall readers -- will need to be reminded about the value of the blog to overall marketing efforts.
The role of a third-party blog manager
Having an internal team run a blog often results in a blog that's initial goal is eventually subsumed by the organizational pressure to "play it safe" and the gravitational-like force that makes executives want to reel the blog in and make it more like a traditional, highly managed PR, such as press release and podcasts. Readers will quickly notice that the once controversial and interesting posts have given way to mostly PR shovelware, and they will dump their RSS subscriptions and delete the bookmark.
One way to avoid this fate is to contract blog management with a third-party provider. A third-party manger will (or should) provide the following benefits:
- A tool to manage the content generation and publishing, feedback, and tracking process.
- Editing experience, both for overall content as well as grammar, spelling, etc.
- A useful external point of view on the value of certain posts and the risk-reward for more controversial posts.
- An external source without internal political ties that can push to keep the content flowing.
- Insight on why to continue on with the project and an ability to deliver that message to the executive team.
I agree that it can be difficult to manage the process - which is why it is critical to have one primary author. That has worked for our corporate blogging efforts. Keep it up - I enjoy your posts.
J