Customize your Approach to Blogging
September 28, 2010
This is a part of a series that was created to help you get the practice of corporate blogging built into your company. This series will walk through the process, necessary roles, in addition to guides for each role to help your company get started quickly.
A corporate blogging program should be well constructed, but as with all practices, there are many approaches that can lead to a successful effort.
Below, we outline two broad examples to help you determine the best approach for your business:
Approach 1: Test Implementation.
Start with a small number of committed people, one from each department or team that will ultimately blog, to start blogging and increase the number of bloggers over time. Determine the plan for each iteration of the effort after you have a few months of progress and have taken the time to check, reflect, and review your results vs. goals. This approach is best used if the senior team is not ready to commit to a full-scale implementation. The downside of this approach is that it will take longer to maximize the impact of the effort and will take more ongoing focus of the senior team and blogging administrator to repeat the training and engagement steps to new bloggers over time.
Approach 2: Full-Scale Implementation.
Determine who in the organization should be blogging and execute a plan that gets everybody blogging from the start. This approach should still be iterative in nature, with ongoing adjustments based on results, but serves the purpose of maximizing the short-term impact of the effort and allowing most of the focus and implementation effort to be contained in a shorter period of time. The downside of this approach is that it will take more time and commitment up-front on the part of the CEO and executive team to ensure that the implementation is successful.
The approach that you determine is best for your company needs to fit within the context of your specific situation. The key is to get a plan together that you can implement relatively quickly and start measuring the progress against your goals.
Next week, I’ll discuss the primary roles necessary for a successful corporate blogging initiative.