STRATEGY
1. Define your vision: So, let’s assume you’re at a company that’s not gotten around to the idea of a corporate blog yet. I’m sure your idea of starting one, will be met with “Why should company X have a corporate blog?” For starters, some forward thinkers would say that the corporate website is irrelevant, which may surprise a few. Some others will say it’s necessary to start a conversation with our users. Right on both counts, but how do you convince upper management that it’s the way to go. Working for a company that embraces that conversation definitely makes life easier and once they do, get to the next step.
That’s when defining a vision for a corporate blog comes in. Different situations call for different measures. You could use a corporate blog as a) an educational tool, b) a feedback loop, c) conversation starters (for the blogosphere as well as other media), d) a focus group, e) a crisis management tool etc…or even e) a combination of the above. I’m sure each company could find it’s own unique application of a blogging platform. At LinkedIn; it’s used as a combination of factors a through c with the ultimate goal of becoming THE resource when it comes to all questions related to LinkedIn.
So, when you search for “LinkedIn” or any product feature for that matter, you should be directed to a blog post on that particular topic. That’s the ultimate goal. The blog is currently the fourth result when you search for “LinkedIn”.
2. Designate an editor or chief blogger: Well, this is really critical since blogging takes a concerted effort involving time, persuasion and editorial skills. This role definitely cannot be placed on the CEO, since he/she has far more important goals to accomplish. In my case, I was a blogger before I started at LinkedIn and it definitely is worth considering an experienced blogger to take on that role.
3. Earn the approval of your internal teams: Strategically, this is THE most important aspect of corporate blogging, because connecting with your internal teams is as important as establishing a connection with your target audience. A good way to start and keep the internal conversation going would be to have an internal blog. Every team meeting or “happy hour” is a chance to find out how different teams would like to communicate to the end user. The blog editor’s job is to facilitate that communication through a unique calendar of blog posts.
TACTICS
4. Define your categories: Once your vision is clear, it becomes easy to create the buckets of content that you’ll start populating the corporate blog with. In LinkedIn’s case, our goal is to create content under 10 categories; simple yet comprehensive. The categories should be a direct result of your vision and goals. If it’s to educate your users, then automatic choices would be “product features”, “tips and tricks”, etc…
5. Enlist contributors and plan posts: Before you start blogging, it’s always good to have a list of possible blog contributors from within your organization. As far as specific products are concerned, it’s good to enlist the product manager of that team and for posts on vision and announcements, C-level executives would be appropriate authors. Also, if there are bloggers within the company, do reach out to them and make them a part of your blog team.
6. Create a blog calendar: Now that you’ve earned the confidence and approval of internal management and teams, it’s time to get into action. Unlike your personal blog, where you could craft any random post depending on the day’s zeitgeist, a corporate blog is built for a specific purpose and so a calendar of posts is essential. The calendar can also be built around the different categories/tags you’ve envisioned and that way you’ll have a steady flow of posts.
7. Define your template/layout: A blog template has to be in consonance with your company brand. As you can see, LinkedIn’s blog template was carefully crafted keeping in mind the simple aesthetics of our website. Yahoo! blog, Yodel Anecdotal has the colors and branding of Yahoo! and so does the Facebook blog.
8. Stick to the categories: As my friend and web strategist Jeremiah often says, “Laser like focus” is an essential prerequisite for any blog, more so for a corporate blog. Once you define the categories or tags, NEVER veer away from them and start creating content on a regular basis and keep increasing the frequency. The LinkedIn blog started at 2-3 posts a week and we’ve slowly moved onto 4 posts a week. Increase the pace in slow increments and don’t turn back.
9. Veer towards content that provides value: Crafting 5 posts a week from 10 categories, means you’ll be veering towards content that has increasingly provided more value for your audience. If your blog is an educational tool, then start focusing on posts that encompass outline tutorials and keep augmenting the value. Maybe, start enhancing your tutorials in multi-media to add to the text based posts.
MEASUREMENT
10. Measure progress: Now this could be a separate post in itself, one I’ve covered in the past and will revisit in the days to come, but once you start your blog it’s always good to invest in an analytics software that can help you track, plan and measure the growth of your blog. This in addition to the feed stats measurement tools. The first few months of blog growth can be measured by the following four stats: 1. Technorati ranking, 2. Alexa ranking, 3. Comments, 4. # Subscribed to your feed, etc…
Feel free to leave your questions, comments or suggestions.

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A few months ago I wrote an article for MarketingProfs entitled Ten Steps to Starting a Company Blog. Even as I was writing that article, I had in mind to later write a followup article that would cover what happens if a company starts blogging, and they run into problems. There’s no shortage of advice available to companies on how to get started blogging, but not a lot out there to help them after the fact.
I recently was contacted by a company that wanted to improve their blogging efforts. Their blog wasn’t having the desired results. But they were posting almost daily, and several members of the company, from the CEO down, were involved in writing for the blog.
The problem was, the blog wasn’t positioned from the reader’s point of view. It was presented as an “online brochure,” with every post focusing on one of the company’s offerings. There was zero interaction with its readers, and no reason for the readers to interact with the bloggers.
How many times have we seen a company do this? They start blogging, and their initial efforts are less than spectacular. We forget that many of us had the same hiccups when we started our own blogs. It takes time and quite a bit of trial and error to run a successful company blog.
The natural inclination for many companies is to use their new blog as a promotional tool, which is exactly what will turn readers off immediately. And many don’t understand how valuable it can be to receive feedback from readers, or how to encourage that feedback.
And these are some of the reasons why I wanted to write my latest article for MarketingProfs, “Eight Ideas for Revitalizing Your Blog,” which published today. I want to encourage companies to start communicating with their customers via their blogs, but I also want to see that they get solid advice so that they can stick with it if the effort isn’t netting the results they were hoping for. I know I made plenty of mistakes when I started blogging, so why should companies be any different?
What are some of the blogging mistakes that you see companies making, and how can they correct them?

Bruce Nussbaum of Business Week says companies are afraid of blogs.
Why?
IMHO companies are still uncomfortable talking to their customers directly, actually, uncomfortable allowing “employees” to talk to customers directly. They like the idea of social networks and communities, they are easily distinguished from the “company.”
Blogs, on the other hand, are written by humans that talk to other humans — employees to customers, employees to partners, employees to investors, employees to stock markets, employees to press (or at least that seems to be the terrifying image).
One of the problems is that the people who are blogging are not necessarily the communication professionals — those the companies would like to be blogging. In fact, they are people who work on the nuts and bolts — it’s a marketing person talking about marketing, it’s a developer talking about developing apps. In fact, if a communication professional started blogging they would be more likely to be participating in the PR blogosphere.
The problem for companies is they want to decide who represents them in the marketplace, that’s why there are spokespeople. I’m sure they would prefer to pick the people who blog for the company and groom them and train them to say the right things. But right now the early adopter bloggers are driven by something else, they self-identify, they just start blogging, they just are blogging. I really think companies need to do a better job of finding the people who are blogging in their company and saying, “Hey, how can we help?”
Look at what Digitas has done with David Armano, and now Greg Verdino .