Tagged with 'blogging'

Want an easy way to hear what all your competitors are talking about? Think of the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki as a dedicated channel for listening in on what they are saying and what customers are saying back. It’s also a good place to get free advice on what makes a good company blog and what doesn’t.

The Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki started as an idea of Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson back in 2005. He wondered why some companies were blogging and some weren’t. One theory he and fellow tech expert Doc Searls were toying with was if companies started blogging as a last ditch effort to save a sinking ship. So they began compiling a list of Fortune 500 company blogs they defined as “active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products” to compare against the companies’ previous 12-month share performance. They also wanted to see if blogging made a difference in performance moving forward. In October 2007 their wiki combined with the Fortune 500 Blog Project Wiki (“another wiki project that sought to review all the Fortune 500 companies that blog”) in an effort to expand both projects. You can read the whole story on Chris Anderson’s blog.

In the early days of the wiki a scant 4% of F500 companies were blogging. Though they still lag way behind the Inc. 500 (blogging at a rate of 39% according to a recent study), the Fortune 500 Business Blog wiki has tracked an increase to 12.8%  of F500 companies blogging by November15, 2008.

At Southwest Airlines interns are cool

So F500 companies are starting to catch up for all the obvious reasons, but their blogging approaches vary greatly. Some use lots of widgets and links to other cool tools (like twitter and flickr) and some don’t. Some get lots of comments and some get none. Some blogs even think interns are cool and let them blog right along with marketing managers and CEOs.

You might think nothing is more uncool than an F500 company. I have visions of guys in suits running around placating stock holders, too. But you might be surprised by what they are doing on their blogs and what types of communications they dispatch. It’s not all mea culpa posts about product recalls and poor customer service. Knowing what makes for good F500  blogging (if you don’t already) is a good way to know what’s good for our own blogs. After all, they remain on the F500 list for some reason.

There are lots of reasons to visit the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki that I will write about in a future post. But one of the biggest reasons is that visiting often can help you make your own blog better. It’s the only place (that I know of) where F500 blogs are viewable from one location, are always current, and are routinely reviewed by other bloggers. So you can easily pick from any of the more than 130 blogs listed (companies such as Microsoft and IBM have multiple blogs) and do some informal research.  See what pulls you in and makes you want to stay for a while. What are the posts talking about? Are they all about product-speak? Which blogs are actively engaging in conversation? What kind of feedback are they getting from your mutual (or potential) customers?

While you are on the wiki take some time to read the assembly of reviews by other bloggers. The ones I read were thoughtful, constructive, and use what reviewers call “businessandblogging.com’s methodology for reviewing companies.” Though I couldn’t find reference to the methodology on the businessandblogging.com web site, it apparently rates blogs according to ease of finding, frequency of posts, engaging and relevant writing, and perceived honesty, among other things.

A good example of one review discusses the Southwest Airlines blog, Nuts about Southwest. Not only is Southwest blogging, they are Twittering, Flickring, YouTubing, Linking In and Facebooking.

You might think that’s overkill for an airline blog. Like Tony Chung said in his article last week, “Nobody wants to read a stupid blog.” And who would read and airline blog? Apparently a lot of people. Southwest consistently has several comments on each post. So they must be doing something right. You can read a review by Mack Collier at The Viral Garden to see what else they (or you) might be doing right.

Uh, BTW, that's a dumb name

In some cases even if the company is talking, no one is talking back much. But at least they are trying to engage in the conversation. For example Johnson & Johnson’s blog, JNJ BTW (Am I the only own who thinks that’s a dumb name?) has some interesting posts, but they rarely get any comments. Is that because they rarely reply to them when they do come in? You can read a review by Richard Young on his Whole Nine Yards blog.

Fortune 500 companies couldn’t ask for better, free, feedback on their blogs than this. Really, they should have to pay for it, and maybe they will some day, but that’s not the intent of the wiki. In the meantime the rest of us can use it for our own amateur research. Being better able to see what is or isn’t working on other blogs gives us some precious insight into what may or may not work on our own.

When I’m not pondering the status of the Internet I help a graphic designer friend by writing code for her clients’ websites. One of our clients owns a hip and trendy spa that marries a massage clinic with a gallery featuring work created by local artists. As I spoke with this client, I discovered that this was more than a business for her. It is a reflection of her passion for wellness, a holistic sense of being.

In addition to her knowledge of the musculoskeletal systems she treated, she considers artwork to be a form of therapy that provides healing for the mind. When she talked about her clinic, her passion was contagious. Fairly soon I began to see the world through her eyes, and started to want what she wanted: for the world to experience total wellness.

Our conversation developed along the lines that she should capture these thoughts and release them on her website as a blog. I suggested this to the graphic designer, who immediately kiboshed this idea, saying, “When I visit a website to read about a spa, I don’t want to read a stupid blog.” So that was the end of that. I promised myself that I would not let this die.

Maybe your business isn’t a massage clinic, but you are probably as passionate about the heart of your business as my client is about hers. I’m not talking about what you do. I’m talking about your business being an extension of who you are. For your business, I believe a blog is the answer. But not a stupid blog.

Why a Blog?

When I told the graphic designer that we should incorporate a blog, her first thoughts were that it would be a collection of meaningless posts amounting to nothing more than naval gazing. I explained that she described “Twitter”, and that a blog doesn’t have to be like that. I’m sure she also thought about how managed blogs on blogspot.com and wordpress.com don’t give users explicit control over the layouts.

A blog engine is a content management system (CMS) that provides the simplest means for content entry and publishing on the planet. Engines differ in scope of features, but most users would find it easy to enter and edit articles, and installing the software on your own web host provides the ability to customize your page layouts. Most engines provide a means to install plugins and widgets that extend the functionality of the blog, adding really cool features that average website users would never have thought possible to include on their own sites.

What Do I Blog About?

My intent is not to convince you to use your blog as a marketing tool, which is the most common use for a blog after random sputtering, but rather an online repository of informational articles, discussions of subjects of interest, news and notes, and in the case of my spa friend, upcoming events and reviews of past events at the clinic.

My spa friend considers herself a “wellness practitioner”, and could write about the role ergonomics, diet, meditation, and regular treatment play in maintaining wellness. Also, their esthetician is passionate about using organic products in her treatments.  If they didn’t feel confident about writing their entries, I could have written the articles for them based on our discussions about what they were interested in.

Likewise, there are aspects of your business that you find work well, and others that are more challenging. You could use blogging as a means to elicit discussion in your search for a solution. Since I started my multifarious blogs, my topics ranged from the foibles in setting up my Tablet PC, coding websites to be compatible with the Mac, and most recently, my struggles learning to code using the ExtJS JavaScript framework. The last post elicited a comment from the development team, which gave me enough hope to continue pushing through.

How Can Blogs Help My Business?

While the impression is that blogs are a one-way, “push” communication mechanism, blogs are designed to be conversations. News sites post articles about recent events (hello—that’s a blog entry) and other users respond to that entry by posting comments. The most controversial articles incite discussion between comment writers themselves, and that adds new value to the existing content on your page. Now, instead of only reading your post on the wonders of caffeine to stimulate your dreams in sleep, readers can participate in the ensuing discussion, more than likely quoting studies of the effect of caffeine on the nervous system, the loss of REM stage activity, et cetera.

The reader community improves the quality of your content, and suddenly, your post takes on a life of its own.

If you don’t feel like you have the time nor the talent to write the quantity of quality entries you want to see on your site, you can hire content creation specialists who can blog for you. You can work out in your deal if the work is meant to be in your voice, or if the writer will receive public credit for their work. Several such services exist, and many content management specialists will contract out to them.

Frequent blog posts of consistent information quality also help your business by adding to the content from your site indexed by search engines.  Your site’s page rank is driven first by popularity—the number of external pages that link to your site, and then by currency—how recent the pages were most updated? Content quality is rated by relevance and keyword frequency—the number of pages within your site that emphasize the same subject matter.

Search engine algorithms are actually a lot more complicated than that, and change often. However the basic rule still applies: websites that contain well-written, quality content, properly structured for machines to read and index well, supported by accurate keywords and summary descriptions, rank higher in search engine indexes. While it’s not a good practice to try and fool Google, it is possible to use blog software to create a site with valuable content that drives your site to the top of the search engine index for your chosen subject matter.

And that can no way be considered a stupid blog.