Q: What is the best way to educate my employees about blogging - if they all don’t completely understand the benefits?
Wow what a great question. What makes it great is that you are totally thinking about your blogging goals right up front. Blogging Best Practices start with widespread employee participation. Employees are 5 times more credible than CEO's as corporate bloggers according to Richard Edelman, and that only makes sense. Who better to tell the stories about your products and services in the context of your customer success? If your goal is to convert your blog traffic into meaningful relationships then the best content is focused on the customers problems and how your business can solve them.
So how do you get the employees interested? First of all, you have to open up blogging to everyone. If you let people talk on the phone then you should empower them to blog. You never know where your best bloggers are going to come from. And this is not something that can be necessarily appointed. Bloggers are born not made.
Secondly you have to share your metrics with them. Since you are doing this with clear ROI objectives, you should be very public internally about how it's going and who's helping. Making hero's of the people who are doing a good job is the best way to get others to join the bandwagon.
For the most part people want to feel empowered and important. Marketing's job is to continually reinforce the importance and appreciation of those that participate.
Here at Compendium Blogware, we often have little contests. Small weekly prizes and a public recognition monthly for those that generate the most readers, are the most prolific bloggers. We also have funny Dunce caps for the three least productive bloggers. It's all fun and good natured but at the same time reinforces that this is an important part of being on the team.
The benefits are not only search engine optimization, but also conversion. Call this out. We chart our monthly metrics in real obvious places so no one can miss that this activity is important to the success of the entire company. Blogging is our number one demand generation activity.
Wow what a great question. What makes it great is that you are totally thinking about your blogging goals right up front. Blogging Best Practices start with widespread employee participation. Employees are 5 times more credible than CEO's as corporate bloggers according to Richard Edelman, and that only makes sense. Who better to tell the stories about your products and services in the context of your customer success? If your goal is to convert your blog traffic into meaningful relationships then the best content is focused on the customers problems and how your business can solve them.
So how do you get the employees interested? First of all, you have to open up blogging to everyone. If you let people talk on the phone then you should empower them to blog. You never know where your best bloggers are going to come from. And this is not something that can be necessarily appointed. Bloggers are born not made.
Secondly you have to share your metrics with them. Since you are doing this with clear ROI objectives, you should be very public internally about how it's going and who's helping. Making hero's of the people who are doing a good job is the best way to get others to join the bandwagon.
For the most part people want to feel empowered and important. Marketing's job is to continually reinforce the importance and appreciation of those that participate.
Here at Compendium Blogware, we often have little contests. Small weekly prizes and a public recognition monthly for those that generate the most readers, are the most prolific bloggers. We also have funny Dunce caps for the three least productive bloggers. It's all fun and good natured but at the same time reinforces that this is an important part of being on the team.
The benefits are not only search engine optimization, but also conversion. Call this out. We chart our monthly metrics in real obvious places so no one can miss that this activity is important to the success of the entire company. Blogging is our number one demand generation activity.
Comments for Questions from this week's Compendium Blogware webinar #3
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