There are some terrific points in this paper for B2B marketers as it relates to Corporate Blogging and Blogging Best Practices. For example:
...many B2B marketers are failing to realize that good blogging style should resemble a coffee shop conversation, not a whitepaper.
But the sentence below really describes the overall tone of the paper:
Corporate bloggers are apparently struggling to sustain a conversation...
What is broken in the Forrester study is the overall "goal". They keep talking about conversation, community, comments, and repeat visitors as the main objective of corporate blogging. These are metrics that are doomed to fail.
Successful business blogs have two characteristics.
First, rather than top down from the "C" level, they open up by having widespread employee participation. Prospects and Customers are not the ones to write frequently about your business....but you hire smart, passionate people who like their jobs, like the customer, are proud of your products....let them blog about it.
Secondly, ROI need to be measured based on search & conversion. Blogging is a content and engagement strategy. Widespread employee blogging generates lots of great topic specific, keyword, frequently updated and authentic content. The more content you generate like this, the more traffic you generate. Most successful Corporate Blogging programs in our system drive three times or more traffic than their traditional sites.
When the searcher lands on a page with a post that specifically matches their search intent...written by a real human being and addressing a similar situation...they convert. They take the next step in the relationship.
The business blog is basically a one shot encounter. They search, they find the blog, they convert to either email, phone or a sales relationship (if we are talking about B2B)
Blogging for search is legitmate, valued by the searcher and highly effective if executed properly.
Posted by: Priyanka on Wednesday, July 16, 2008
We at Mahindra have recently started a corporate blog, www.mahindrauniverse.com. And we find that posts that are more relevant to the reader's daily life rather than business oriented become more popular. What do you think??
Posted by: Chris Baggott on Friday, July 18, 2008
I guess I would have to ask other than your business, what else can you bring relevance to the visitors daily life about? Ultimately, the answer to successful blogging is a mix of humanization and specific business benefits of your product or service. I wouldn't expect a reader or visitor to my Compendium Blog to be all that interested in news about my child-rearing philosophy...even though I could guess that most of my vistitors have children. I've not earned that right or have any established credibitliy. Where I have Credibility, and the reason people come to my blog is to learn about Corporate Blogging. Does that make sense? Human and real, but on-topic. Thanks for the Comment Chris Baggott CEO Compendium Blogware www.compendiumblogware.com
Posted by: Priyanka on Saturday, July 19, 2008
Well our corporate blog is on 4 topics innovation, sustainability, globalization and customer centricity. We had this post in which the writer spoke about innovation and out-of-the-box thinking by talking about a local movie which had just been released and was different from the usual movies.http://www.mahindrauniverse.com/mahindra_universe/2008/06/examining-the-out-of-the-box-p.html Of course there would be no reason for a post just on this movie (as would one on your child rearing abilities) but when something like innovation is talked about with respect to the events in the readers daily life then it becomes much more interesting to read! Do check out the post and we would appreciate your views there.