Blogs can be an effective tactic to reach an organization’s constituencies. The medium is dynamic and personal – you are the publisher. You will become better acquainted with your customers. But like any other marketing activity, the program must be planned and pursued with consistency. These challenges almost always arise related to blogs:
- Content strategy: content must engage your audience while meeting your marketing goals (Value for the audience, value for the publisher)
- Recruiting appropriate internal contributors
- Maintaining a consistent flow of posts with quality content
The content of the blogs should further your marketing goals, and internal contributors must be individuals who “speak the language” of the audience on the selected topics. And while the first blog post may be easy, maintaining a regular, week-after-week consistency is a challenge. Outside help may be needed to keep the program organized and on schedule.
Content Strategy
Deciding on your blog content structure is the first order of business – which topic categories make sense based on customer interest and your marketing requirements? Do you focus on a specific market niche? Do you sell into a single vertical market or into many? How closely do you work with partners? For example, Calysto, while specializing in the mobile and telecom industries, maintains an extremely broad knowledge base and service expertise within this specialization. Hence, we have multiple regular contributors to our blog program – all deeply experienced in these industries and in marketing – who offer a variety of market viewpoints as well as “how-to” advice on a wide range of marketing strategies and tactics.
Contributors
Then, identify the best contributors from within the organization. This task can vary tremendously based on the character of the organization. For a small company, perhaps there is one person who should be cast in the spokesperson’s role, especially if there is one individual who has industry recognition and whose comments will support the goals of the blog program.
One way to define roles is to separate them into visionary and technical, general and specific categories. These may translate into titles, such as CEO, CTO, chief architect, and so on. If you focus on specific national or world regions, a spokesperson for each region may make sense.
- Overall company direction – CEO, CTO
- Industry commentary – CMO
- Regional content – country manager
- Technical direction – CTO, technical leads
- Specific technical
- Other, depending on market
Many senior executives enjoy writing, and most are experienced at publicly delineating the organization’s goals and positions. You will need to decide which executives are best suited for each communication channel. However, they usually have brutal demands on their time and crafting a blog post every week requires outside assistance.
Consistency
To provide consistency, you need to provide support – support in defining a schedule of blog posts within the categories that you decide upon, perhaps providing initial drafts for some of the contributors, editing some posts – serving as a safety net in case the designated contributors cannot meet the deadlines.
How often should you publish a blog? This depends on the nature of your audience, and the number of segments for which you want to publish a blog. In general, once a week is a good place to start – this frequency is good if you have a single blog, or per blog if you have several blogs addressing different audiences. You want to be consistent – publish your blog on a specific day of the week. But don’t hesitate to throw in an additional post or change the timing if an event occurs that will interest your audience. some examples:
- Hitachi Data Systems has a well-organized blog program.
- Hu’s Blog – Hubert Yoshida, HDS CTO – approximately once per week
- Data Center Advisors – various contributors, weekly
- The Storage Economist – David Merrill, Chief Economist, weekly
- I/O – An Inside Look at HDS – Greg Knieriemen HDS Technology Evangelist, weekly
The bottom line: as a blog publisher, you have a lot of flexibility in content, publication frequency, and contributors. Just remember: value for the audience, value for the publisher.