Q4 Blog

CIRI Ontario opened the fall season at the Albany Club yesterday with a presentation on ‘Using Advanced Technologies Effectively.  Speakers included Michael O’Connor Clarke, VP of Thornley Fallis Communications; Natalie Johnson, Manager of Social Media with General Motors and Parker Mason, Web Content Specialist with the CNW Group. (More info on event/presenters . Michael O’Connor also blogs about this event)          

Attended by approximately 60 people, the topic was focused specifically on blogging and so the use of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and YouTube were largely omitted.

For the uninitiated, the presentation provided an introduction on how to start using corporate blogs as an effective communications channel. Here’s a brief synopsis of the presentation with a few other helpful bits added:

12.4% of Fortune 500 companies actively use corporate blogs up from 4% in 2005. Some of the most active include Dell, General Motors and Sun Microsystems. (Technorati.com provides a comprehensive annual report on the state of blogging)

Why should you use social media? Branding has changed – your brand is no longer “what you say about it, it’s what people say it is” (David Carlick,  co-founder Doubleclick)

As a blogger, it’s important to understand Technorati.com – an Internet search engine that tracks blogs and other forms of citizen media, including video blogs (vlogs), podcasts and amateur movies and videos in real-time. All this activity is monitored and indexed within minutes of posting. Technorati rates and ranks blogs based on:  Reactions – the number of inbound links to a url, meaning you could have multiple inbound links coming from the same people; Ranking – the more people that link to a particular blog, the higher the ranking; and Authority – calculated based on the number of unique blogs that link to/reference a specific blog.

At Technorati you can search the blogosphere for topics of interest and then view information according to criteria such as ‘Authority’.

Google Blog Search -  a beta project from Google, allows you to search the Internet or blogosphere by topic. It apparently allows you to type in your company name or url and see who’s linking to you. It’s not as intuitive as I’d hoped – I couldn’t find this feature.

Before launching a corporate blog you should consider 4 Essential Policies (from Thornley Fallis):

Corporate blogging policy – Who is going to blog?  What topics will you cover? Establish workflow and approvals. Some good examples for blogging policies would include IBM, Sun Mircrosystems  and Harvard Law School (As expected, the Harvard Law policy is heavier on the legalese). Another approach is the Earl Gilmore rule: Use good judgement. If you don’t use good judgement you are in deep trouble.

Blog monitoring and interaction policy – How do you respond when you’re being blogged about, particularly when the comments are negative and damaging? Where do you draw the line in being transparent but limiting offensive material? (eg. profanity)

Outbound commenting policy – (Earl Gilmore rule applies). It’s very important in establishing this policy to be very clear about conflicts of interest.

Comment moderation policy – these are the most important posts you’ll ever write and will be the best ‘troll’ insurance you can build.

Once you have policies established, you’re ready to get started. No advice was given regarding specific blog applications. PC World ranked the top blog platforms as Blogger, WordPress (which we use at Q4) TypePad, Tripod and Squarespace. There are a slew of articles on this - a quick search should provide lots of ideas.

To get started in corporate blogging, the most important points seemed to be:

Just do it – for blogs to be effective you have to post regularly and you need to ensure that your content is relevant (this goes back to policy #1 – if you establish a content framework, it’s easier to keep content relevant and in line with reader interests)

Build a community – if you write it, will they come? The best way to build interest in your blog is to be interested in other blogs relevant to your topic. Reference and link to other relevant blogs, build on their content. (Back to Technorati – search out other relevant blogs, particularly ‘Authority’ blogs – subscribe to RSS feeds for these blogs and actively follow them.) Ultimately as you build more readership, ask other people to put you on their blogroll. (Blogroll –  list of blogs, usually placed in the sidebar of a blog, that reads as a list of recommendations by the blogger of other blogs. For more blog definitions see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogroll#B  and you’ll be talking the talk in no time.)

Use multi-media – blogs can be more than just text.  General Motors uses a lot of video (with transcripts) This doesn’t have to be expensive. Q4 purchased full lighting, a great HD video cam/camera, wireless and wired microphone, backdrop & stand, carry bags  for under $3,500 – luckily I’m married to a professional photographer www.karlrichter.com who had no bias in helping me select equipment. (If you’re interested in our equipment list, contact me and I can provide you with details.) The best way to ensure that you can use video frequently is to limit the need for editing. We have found that brief, candid interviews work best. It keeps it real. Too much editing and you’ll never do it.

Obviously there’s so much more to cover on this topic so we’ll do another blog post on this in the future.

We’d like to hear from you regarding your corporate blogging initiatives. What platform are you using? Do you have a corporate blogging policy? Do you actively follow other relevant blogs? What are your favourites?  And what other social media is your company using? As always, your comments are welcome.

Related posts:

1. Buy-Side seminar points to the web and social media as prime channels of communication
2. Darrell’s Live Blog from CIRI 2008 on Zu Blog
3. CIRI Conference Review

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