Day 2 of the inaugural MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Chicago started out with a discussion between MP President Roy Young and Forrester Research Senior Analyst Laura Ramos examining “What’s New for B2B Marketers.” Amidst her comments, Laura expressed her take on corporate blogging: that it should only take place after a corporation has its policies in place.
What an interesting conundrum, I thought. Should a marketer simply start blogging or wait instead until all of the blogging policies and procedures are established before beginning?
Although the absolute answer is that it depends on the organization, the industry, the product or service, I suggest strongly that the blog come before the policy.
Here’s why:
? Social media [i.e., all those tools like blogging, podcasting, tags, wikis and online networks that defy marketing tradition and make for immediacy, authenticity and community] cannot be delegated to an agency. You may get outside guidance, but ultimately the responsibility resides within, requiring that you build your own internal expertise.
? Social media must be experienced firsthand and then perfected over time. It has to be figured out.
? Social media doesn’t get turned on and off. Rather, it requires slow and consistent building over time …. adding content, developing credibility, strengthening voice and maintaining presence over time.
? Social media takes personal commitment. It takes an individual to champion the regular posting of content, to channel the passion, to develop a voice …. individual or corporate, to establish credibility.
? Social media is not for every organization.
Read the full article here on MarketingProfs today for my reasoning.
And consider two interesting examples that emerged from the B2B Forum concurrent sessions. From Josh Hallett’s “Bringing B2B Blogging to the New Level,” Deborah Franke, e-Marketing Manager for Emerson Process Management, described her three year path to launching Emerson’s external blogs. Her case illustrates the more conservative approach that Ramos advocates: beginning with key corporate stakeholders [e.g., legal, HR and executives] to establish policy.
Interestingly, although not part of the initial strategy, Franke found that the launch of an internal blog wound up demonstrating more effectively than a year’s worth of education, presentations and policy setting, the value of blogs. That led quickly to the launch of the first external blog, Emerson Process Experts.
From David Armano’s “Social Media in a B2B World,” Todd Andrlik, Director of Marketing and Public Relations for Leopardo Companies, Inc., shared with us the powerful and vibrant newsroom, Leopardo Construction News, he created using a blogging platform.
Certainly not a traditional approach, but it absolutely injects freshness and true newsworthiness. It even includes a window onto a Leopardo YouTube.com channel offering easy access to company videos, and earlier this summer, it made RSS available to visitors. That level of creativity comes from a willingness to experiment and explore, something that a policy-first focus often discourages.
So, tell me, now that you’ve read the full article, which you do think comes first: the blog or the policy?
Tags: CB Whittemore, Flooring The Consumer, MarketingProfs Business To Business Forum 2007, Social Media
The policy.
It’s great and hip and wow to launch your blog before your management knows that social media doesn’t involve cocktails by the pool, but any activity that puts your content — whether facts, insights, names, anything — out in the public needs to be *understood* by your company (read management, maybe legal, etc) prior to launch.
Anecdote: at Sony, once upon a time, a direct report of mine decided he’d be glad to talk to an end user who called in through the switchboard with a problem. His tape had jammed in his professional camcorder. My mkting manager said, in so many words, “yeah, it happens… we’ll get you fixed…”, which after his lawyer was through with us, cost us a new $20K camera. Instead of a $10 tape and a warranty repair at a Service Center.
Think through the problem first — decide who is blogging, what they’re blogging about, and when others need to be involved — before you jump in the pool.
Stephen, how do you know what to address in the policy if you haven’t experimented with the medium first?
Understand the absolute “must haves” up front — no pre-announcements, defined roles and areas of responsibilities, role of legal/management in approvals, role and bandwidth of customer service, what to do with comments that beg responses, etc.
Any time a professional organization enters into any form of outbound marketing communication, there needs to be an understood approval process — ask yourself if blog posts are any less important than press releases or ad copy. Do these go out without a defined strategy or approval process?
Once role management is clearly defined and everyone understands what is expected of them, social media becomes an effective way of creating a dialog. Experimentation naturally follows.
I agree with Stephen. Blogging deserves the same level of planning and strategy as other marketing communications endeavors do. Of note, blogging can expand a company’s liability exposure. And it’s not like a print ad campaign that can be pulled if a problem arises. Items published on the Internet tend to stay around forever. The Media Law Resource Center tracks lawsuits facing bloggers. Here’s the link if you’re interested: http://www.medialaw.org/bloggerlawsuits
I think it’s impossible to have a set-in-stone blogging policy until everyone is familiar with the space. It’s fine to go in saying that every writer will publish 2 posts a week, but what happens a week into it when only one writer can actually do that? It’s great to say that your policy is to moderate comments everyday, but what happens when the weekend comes and someone has to log-in on Saturday and Sunday to approve comments?
I think it’s better to start out with blogging guidelines that become policy after the blog, and its writers, have had their initial growing pains.
BTW welcome aboard Christine!
Marcia, thanks for the link.
How do you determine if a blog is right for your organization? Before committing all of those valuable resources?
Blog experimentation is invaluable. It can address topics only tangentially related to an organization – without causing risk, yet generating insight and information.
Doesn’t that actually help to think through the problem; to help decide who is blogging, what they’re blogging about, and when others need to be involved, before jumping into the big pool?
Thanks, Mack!
I like the notion of guidelines that can evolve with experience.
Welcome aboard C.B. (so good to have another set of initials here
.
You know why I probably love blogging so much, or at least a large reason thereof? I can set my own policy–and hey, if I mess up, my readers will (hopefully!) forgive me. But when you’ve got a company blog, readers aren’t always so forgiving (a ‘company blog’ is less “human” to us and we’re just less forgiving).
There needs to be a baseline policy in place. There are very real things like liability. Yes, it’s a path we’re all laying together and companies should definitely be getting into this space in some way (and most definitely “listening” to it). But a well-defined policy need exist. After all, it’s a company blog.
Depends on your idea of policy. All company policies are different so there are inevitably companies for whom blogging can be integrated easily and early because the company is “that type of company” for others it needs reflection and needs to correspond to the companies direction for the future.
The blogging question is secondary.
I’m with Stephen – to a point. I don’t think the rules need to be so complicated that they have to go through three teams of lawyers before a company starts blogging. Common sense should apply. Give people a lot of leeway with some general guidelines about how to behave. Trust (but verify).
Thanks, CK, Timothy and Cam – really good points.
CK: it’s definitely critical to be concerned about liability in view of a blog being company vs. individual, as Marcia says, too.
Timothy, companies certainly do vary in their notion of policy. For many blogging is the wrong decision.
Cam, I like that you mention common sense, and leeway with general guidelines.
Here’s what I’m observing – there are quite a few companies out there, big ones, too, going out and doing the blogging thing. Or at least their definition of the blogging thing. They have their policies in place; they are all buttoned up. And, their blogs are no better than a traditional, flat, one-way marketing brochure filled with marketing speak, because they don’t “get” what a blog is.
Wouldn’t they have been better off figuring out the nature of the medium first?
Of course, I agree. Look at the Wal-Mart blog. It’s stupendous in its banality.
That’s an excellent example!
As said above, it depends on the company. But I think a company or any organization can set some general guidelines for its blog representatives, without “knowing the space.” There might be, for example, certain things the company doesn’t want discussed publicly at this time, such as future plans or personnel matters. I think it’s fair for the company to establish certain guidelines — not set-in-stone rules, necessarily, but some general boundaries.
These things don’t have to wait until the company knows the space. And they don’t have to impact the actual content and the importance of making it “real” and not just one-way communication.
If your ultimate goal is to start a company blog visible to the public, I’m convinced the *internal* blog comes first. You can create a personal blog policy very easily (at worst, “don’t talk about work”), but policies surrounding what’s said on a corporate blog need to be emergent, specific to your company and your environment.
So start a blog, see what other employees think, have a lawyer vet the content after a month or so. Adjust the content mix, repeat, set the policies, *then* start the public corporate blog. You’ll already have an idea of what’s important to people in your space and what problems might come up, and you’ll also have made sure you have the discipline to keep posting.
David and Jennifer, you make really good points, assuming a company knows what’s going on with social media. What if the company has no clue? And it’s the lonely marketer wanting to introduce and experiment with the new medium? Other employees think it’s a waste of time and the lonely marketer knows in his or her gut that it’s the right thing to do?
David and Jennifer, you make really good points, assuming a company knows what’s going on with social media. What if the company has no clue? And it’s the lonely marketer wanting to introduce and experiment with the new medium? Other employees think it’s a waste of time and the lonely marketer knows in his or her gut that it’s the right thing to do?
Lonely marketer starts sending out CVs to more interesting companies.
Unless lonely marketer successfully demonstrates the value of the medium which then leads to more formal progams as well as proper policies….