A Corporate blog is a strange beast. It must represent a whole company, its commercial interests, offer personality and sincerity and be interesting enough for your customers (or anyone relevant to your company) to want to read it. 

While the jury is still out on whether every company should have a blog, there are a few that have stepped forward and tried it out. As with most things newish and wonderful, learning happens through trial and error. I’ve thus tracked down the authors behind 3 very different corporate blogs in order to learn about how they get it done.

A corporate blog is a strange beast.

The first blogger I interviewed is Diane Tuman, who writes for the Zillow blog. Zillow is an online real estate service, providing tools and information for helping people “get the edge in real estate”. A blog thus seems like a natural way for them to get information out “nimbly”.

“It was initially very Zillow focused…then the blog evolved to follow more interesting stories about real estate,” especially stories about celebrity real estate, which “people love reading”. “Most people use a blog to tout their product. We do that on occasion, but it’s pretty rare”, said Diane, who prefers to report on information that will “help people”.

Diane pointed out that attracting and keeping a dedicated audience is a challenge, but that “bridging gaps in communication” and being able to reach other bloggers support her view that “every company should have a blog”.

Josh Jones, one of the founders of DreamHost and the company’s most regular blog contributor, shared that they started a blog because “some employees thought it would be a good idea”. 4 years later Jeff says that the behind the scenes information has made their customers (who form the bulk of their readership) more understanding if “things go wrong”. He also pointed out that it’s important for a company blog to be more interesting than most others out there.

“A company in any industry learns a lot of pretty interesting things about the world/their market/dealing with customers and employees/making money that would probably be pretty interesting for others to hear”.

Palesa Sibeko, content manager for the South African Samsung blog, shared that their content is dictated (in many ways) by their customers. They “source a lot of topics from Google Analytics and forums”, as well as allowing readers to submit posts themselves. The blog has thus taken a load off of the traditional contact channels – support lines and forums and ensures that customers don’t “only have contact with Samsung when something goes wrong”.

While the 3 blogs have different approaches to content and authorship, there were some common lessons to be learned:

1. You shouldn’t count on your whole company blogging
All 3 content managers shared that while the entire company could hypothetically contribute, it ends up being much smaller and regular teams who do. This is not necessarily a bad thing though.

2. You need a central organiser and editor
Despite managing a schedule and keeping language and grammar up to standard, there are some issues with having more than one writer. As Diane shared: 
“Ultimately, you want a blog to have a personality, but not something so far out in left field that it’s not cohesive and doesn’t make sense.”

3. Your content can be varied but must be dictated by your readers
The way you approach content must be dictated more by what your customers would want to read about than by what you want to tell them (not that the latter is completely unimportant). Bear in mind that a blog is not a press release.
 
4. Twitter and RSS are your friends
There is an overlap in readership between those who would follow you on Twitter and those who follow your content on a blog. There’s no reason engagement shouldn’t spread across a number of communications platforms (like Facebook for example) to send more readers to your blog and help your content spread.

5. Measuring ROI doesn’t seem to be a formalised process
All 3 bloggers are measuring success based on engagement – which means how people interact with the blog – but none of them have formalised a process for measurement yet. This is a point you’ll have to work out for your own company, we have set metrics to measure GottaQuirk – but this isn’t necessarily necessary for every blog.

I have to make the obvious statement that every company blog is largely an entity in itself.

There are, in my opinion, things to stick to (like responding to every comment) but very few recipes for success. While there is way more advice available than can fit into this post, my main lesson is that the nature of your blog should ultimately be dictated by the specific knowledge your company has to share with its readers. It's also certainly worth considering what kind of returns (like readership or engagement) will justify your time investment.

What are your tips for a company blog?  What are your suggestions for us here at GottaQuirk? 

Also check out:

• Engaging as a Company
• Tips for Your Corporate Blog