Analyzing Your Corporate Blogs

In this section, I will cover those corporate blogs that are not a part of your Web site or your Intranet. These stand-alone corporate blogs can be hosted on either blogging platforms – such as WordPress.com or blogger.com; on Web sites of industry-specific or general publications or specialized information resources – again industry-specific or general. Which must be optimal for communicating with your target audience.

Usually, corporate blogs are authored not by businesses (otherwise they will be perceived as pure advertising and treated as such), but by entrepreneurs, managers and professionals employed by the business in question.

Your corporate blogs have the same fundamental objective as your Web site and your mobile apps – make money for your company. Generate financial value. Therefore, the core component of your corporate blogging system is a highly efficient corporate process for generating financial value with your corporate blogs. And, obviously, a financial model.

Hence – believe it or not – your blog has essentially the same fundamental performance indicators (FPI) as your business – financial value, free cash flow and ROIC. Traditional blog-related KPI such as number of visits, post views, comments and times shared – are important only to the extent that help you understand how your blog is making money for your company.

You can not sell your products and services directly with your blog posts. If you try to do that, it will be rightfully perceived as advertising/promotion and will be treated as such. Meaning that no one will visit your blog (let alone read it).

Therefore, the key operational objective of your blog posts is to create an ‘itch’ (irresistible desire) to learn more about your company and its products and services; to visit your corporate Web site or download and launch your mobile applications. The latter will do the sales job. This objective you must have in mind at all times when writing your blog posts.

But first you need to make sure that your blog posts are read by a maximum possible number of your clients. To make it happen, you must satisfy their aggregate needs & desires – valuable information (functional and financial value) or entertainment (emotional value). Or both – in this case, it is called infotainment.

Ideally, you would want your blog posts to go viral.  The latter in this context means that your blog posts become very popular among your potential clients by circulating quickly from person to person via other blog posts, posts in social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest), twitting, etc.

However, you must make sure that this ‘epidemic’ makes your company very popular and creates an avalanche in your Web site visits as well as in downloading and usage of your mobile apps. 

To make it possible, you will need a professional on board who (a) has a lot to say – and this ‘lot’ is valuable to your clients and (b) knows how to say it – in terms of substance, structure and style. The latter, however, can be accomplished by hiring an experienced and competent editor.

To create the maximum amount of emotional value for its reader (i.e., to make your blog visually attractive), it needs to have not just an attractive design, but the one that truly stands out from the crowd. Which will require services of a competent and experienced blog designer.

Making your post go viral is one of the most efficient (if not the most efficient) way to promote it. It is free, it is fast and it covers a lot of your target audience. Another free and efficient way (albeit with a much more narrow) scope is to promote your blog is via your own tweets, It goes without saying that you must have links to all of your corporate blogs on your Web site, Facebook groups and pages, mobile apps and in all of your presence in social networks.

In some cases, it might be beneficial to embed a call to visit your corporate blog into some of your communications campaigns. Also, you must remember that a blog is simply a special instance of a Web site; therefore, you can (and must!) use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools – see above – to promote your blog.  

Obviously, your blog posts must be tightly integrated into your overall corporate communications system and your strategic and operational management system. And match your KEF (especially social and cultural), your corporate mission statement (informing and entertaining the public is a noble component of your corporate mission), your corporate vision statement, your marketing and communications strategy, your UVP, your corporate culture and your corporate code of conduct.