How to Write a Great Business Blog
with Debbie Weil
If you've read the other session descriptions - and you haven't been hiding under a rock for the past 18 months or so - then you know that blogging is an effective way to market and brand yourself as an expert and a thought leader. But with over 100 million blogs, (according to Technorati), how do you make your blog stand out? How do you attract enough visitors to build a community of readers? With a smart, well-written blog, of course.
In this session Debbie will dispense specific tips and tricks for writing a great blog and for soliciting feedback and comments from your readers: how often to blog (not as often as you might think); how to write effective (i.e. Google-friendly) titles for your entries; how to select topics to write about; what you should NOT blog about; why you should add videos (and how easy it is to do); why inserting links into every blog post is essential (links are the currency of the blogosphere); advanced linking tricks, and more. Join us for a hands-on session!
Debbie Weil is a corporate and CEO blogging consultant and author of The Corporate Blogging Book (Portfolio 2006) published in Mandarin Chinese and Italian. A graduate of Harvard, she has a unique background as a veteran journalist with an MBA and corporate marketing experience. She writes BlogWriteForCEOs.com, a Technorati Top 10,000 blog. Her clients include Global 100 and Fortune 500 companies, including GlaxoSmithKline. She has parsed the implications of Web 2.0 for thousands of executives and entrepreneurs in the U.S. and Europe. She has been quoted in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, THE NEW YORK TIMES, BUSINESSWEEK and numerous other publications. Visit Debbie online at www.debbieweil.com.
DO YOU HAVE A QUESTION ABOUT HOW TO WRITE A GREAT BUSINESS BLOG? Then click on the comments link below, post your question and we will do our best to cover your specific question on the teleseminar.
Special "A Brand You World" Offer from Debbie Weil "Anyone who buys a copy of my book on Amazon and sends me their Amazon receipt will get FREE my one-hour audio recording How to Write a Great Corporate Blog. (This is a US $47 value)." Get the details.
What's a good rule of thumb for creating a comment moderation policy to post on your corporate blog?
Posted by: Tiffany Monhollon | November 08, 2007 at 11:20 AM
What are some ways of enticing readers to post comments and engage without writing controversial or bi-partisan posts? Or is that the best way?
Posted by: Tom Hudock | November 10, 2007 at 08:49 PM
I'm not sure anyone is answering your questions so I thought I would chime in and do so.
Tiffany: There are three ways to manage comments on a corporate blog - or any blog for that matter.
1) Total free for all and all comments go live immediately. I don't recommend this for any client.
2) No comments at all. I don't recommend this either because that defeats the purpose of a blog, but Seth Godin manages his blog this way and he does well.
3) Moderated comments. I do recommend this because someone in your organization will have a chance to review comments before they go live.
Now, to the bulk of your question, the policy. Your policy is determined by your Terms of Use (ToU) page, which should be publicly available and is usually found in the footer (at the bottom of the page) on your blog. While each company should have their own ToU specific to their company and their social media needs, my advice would be to take a look at the ToU of other companies and then get a feel for how to create your own.
Once you've created your ToU page and posted it live, if someone submits a comment that isn't in accordance with your ToU, you can nicely let them know and point them to to your ToU page. This removes the element of 'personal decision' when it comes to approving blog comments and your company is less likely to be accused of playing favorites.
The thing you NEVER EVER want to do is edit someone's comment. By editing a comment, you change your company's existing legal structure to that of a publisher. Bad news. If a comment doesn't fit within the ToU, send the commenter a link to the ToU page and let them know they can resubmit the comment if they so chose.
Tom: One of the things you'll learn very quickly is that you cannot control how people engage. It is your turf and you can manage the conversation quite a bit with your Terms of Use guideliness, but your fooling yourself if you think you can get people to post anything other than what's on their mind and their feelings.
I don't know what you mean when you say 'controversial'. Do you mean foul language or just comments that go against the grain of what you have to say?
The former is dictated by programming the blogging software (any good consultant will set this up for you from the beginning) and the later is a lost cause. If you only want people to agree with you via your blog, then you might want to look into advertising where you don't have to get feedback you might not want to hear.
I always tell our clients to not only be a part of the conversation bu FACILITATE that conversation by not trying to control it. You learn much more about your business, your industry and your market that way.
I hope this helps you both!
-Lena
http://weblog.infoworld.com/social-media-360/
Posted by: Lena West | November 23, 2007 at 03:25 PM
An effective corporate blog is a highly creative endeavor -- and runs counter to almost every other kind of established form of corporate communications.
Posted by: Andria | March 26, 2008 at 04:44 AM