Access whitepaper

Who's Your Company Blogger?

Tuesday, December 2, 2008 by Douglas Karr
There's always debate on the net about who you should allow to blog and speak for your company.  Mark Cuban is an extreme, but he does not allow anyone within his organizations to blog since he wishes to be the sole voice of the company.  Personally, I think this probably hurts him more than helps him.

Other companies put their Marketing team on it, so the content is really regurgitated site content, whitepapers and case studies.  The verbiage is refined with little personality. Blah... blah... blah... Zzzzzzz...

I think Chris Baggott nails it when he says that the best company bloggers you have are the people that are closest to your customers.  They understand the relationship between your products and services and how it assists their business.  They also understand the challenges and successes.

When you wonder about who will be a company blogger, you should ask yourself who you'll entrust your clients to?  Who will be fulfilling your business relationship?  Since blogs provide such a rich quantity of qualified leads through search engines, it's typical that the search engine user is asking the exact question that your employee can answer.  Not your CEO, not your President, not your VP of Marketing... but the person who you've entrusted the relationship with.

That means that you can assume a pattern where your employee who handles the customer will write about topics important to the customer... which, in turn, will be topics important to a new visitor!  As a result, customer-facing employees happen to make fantastic company bloggers.

Comments for Who's Your Company Blogger?

Tuesday, December 2, 2008 by Don Schindler:
I think that your suggestion above is dead-on on who should be blogging but that doesn't necessary mean they will or can. There are some very good executives who are awesome at building relationship but when it came to email correspondence they were downright scary. And I've ran into quite a few who just didn't want to. Forcing them to be "out-there" might end up with some undesirable results. I believe that anyone and everyone in the company should be invited to blog if they want to. Each person has their own perspective. I also believe that if they have personal blogs, the company should link to them. This is transparency and trust in your employees. If their blog would embarrass you then why are they at your company? I personally like to get to know the people I'm going to be working with and blogs are an outlet to that personally and an inlet into the company. Just my two cents. www.donschindler.com www.mediasauce.com
Tuesday, December 2, 2008 by Amy Stark:
I agree... but customers always want to "talk to the manager." A strong bond of trust between upper management and the customer base is a good idea, too, don't you think?
Tuesday, December 2, 2008 by Douglas Karr:
Great feedback Don - and I hope I didn't give the impression these folks should be used in spite of Marketing or Leadership. Nor should they ever be forced (maybe a little arm-twisting, though!).
Tuesday, December 2, 2008 by Lorraine Ball:
I have to agree with Chris. For the first year or the Roundpeg blog, I did all the writing, and it was exhausting. Now everyone at Roundpeg writes from time to time. it is still mostly my stuff, but Taylor, Amy and Annalise add an interesting perspective on projects they have completed. The multiple voices, help people get to know all of us.. I would tell clients to ease into it slowly, maybe approving drafts written by others before you completely cut them loose.

Leave a comment





Captcha

Free Webinar

"How marketers are producing blogging ROI in just 10 min/day."


Hosted by CEO and CoFounder Chris Baggott
July 16th, 2009
Sign up here »

Meet Our Team

Doug Karr Abby Brosmer-Rivera Ali Sales Brian McKay Blake Matheny Brian Millis Chris Baggott Chantelle Flannery The Client Corner Dereck Martin James Litton Jennifer Buscher Jenni Edwards Jim Hyslop Jess Wehner Krystal Featherston Kaila Woodside Lindsey Young Mitch Burk Megan Glover Meghan Peters mikey mioduski P.J. Hinton Randy Cox Sarah Sedberry Tracy Donaldson Brett Fritz Chandra Chavez Julie Murphy