A corporate blog can be as effective a tool as the concerned organization wants it to be. An oft observed fact, however, is that it seldom gets utilized to its maximum potential

The “because it’s there” style of thinking probably didn’t work for George Mallory’s Mt. Everest quest; truth be told, we would never know as he died on that very quest—and it definitely won’t work for your corporate blog if it’s just a mindless piece of cyberspace real estate with poor construction and little or no traffic.

Most Marketers Have the Wrong or Incomplete Idea About Corporate Blogging

A close look at various corporate blogs would be enough to tell you that most organizations have a corporate blog simply because the blogosphere is there and everybody else is making a beeline for it. To make things worse, most marketing professionals fail to get the idea about what makes a corporate blog tick, and have a poor traffic on their blogs , which makes them conclude—quite erroneously—that blogging is an ineffective marketing tool.

That however, is a fallacy. As has been discussed in earlier posts, the corporate blog can be a powerful vehicle to drive brand awareness and foster a sense of engagement. There are plenty of examples of organizations that did it right—GE, Caterpillar, Starbucks, to name a few—for it to be a fluke.

Running a successful corporate blog involves letting go of some crippling (and mistaken) notions and wising up to some candid facts about blogging in general and about how it figures into your corporate identity equation.

Here goes.

Traffic on Your Corporate Blog Won’t Generate by Itself

When organizations first felt a need for a presence on the information superhighway, followed by translation of the need thus felt into actual websites, they had a slightly flawed concept of the way a corporate website is supposed to work. The website was treated as a marketing ‘channel’ that would simply pull (and sales leads) visitors by virtue of being there on the WWW. It took some time to sink in that it’s more of a storefront: you can’t rely on the visitors who just casually stroll in to contribute much to your revenues and there must be targeted marketing activity conducted to attract the right visitors.

Initially, corporate blogs were similarly regarded as yet another web page that bears the company brand and would act as a gateway to bring a visitor to the main website. While it is true that the keyword oriented nature of blogs lends itself well to boosting your organic ratings, just remember that that is a secondary benefit. To generate traffic to your corporate blog, you need to be sincere and committed to bringing new material to your readers, and try to get some participation from their end by getting a conversation of sorts flowing. Blog marketers strive to write blogs that not only generate readership but also invoke a sense of involvement that compels readers to comment on posts, thus opening lines of communication.

Unlike running a normal website where fresh visitors are all webmasters usually care about, a corporate blog should aim to cultivate visitors who keep coming back for more. It is these visitors who can be called ‘readers’, and building up readership takes time, as opposed to building up traffic. These corporate blog readers are an asset because you have a steadily rising group of people who are being constantly exposed to your brand and being reminded of your products and/or services. Besides, readers are more likely to complete a call to action such as ‘liking’ your corporate blog or sharing a link to a particular post on their Facebook walls (or tweets). That is also how you steadily grow the traffic to your corporate blog, trusting the social networking links to do their bit organically, but not completely relying on them.

Be Ready to Commit to Your Corporate Blog Readers; Regular Content is All it Takes

As already mentioned, readers will not come up overnight, at least not in enough numbers for it to matter either way. Visitors come to your corporate blog, find themselves getting engaged by the post, and then not only start regularly visitin, but may also recommend your corporate blog to others. But, its more than just time that’s at stake here: this process also demands dedicated commitment. So, you must post regularly, stick to a schedule and, above all, maintain a level of writing quality.

It doesn’t just take time, it also takes commitment. That means posting regularly and to a schedule. Users are more likely to visit your blog if they know you release a post on a certain day each week. Of course, ultimately you want them to subscribe, so they don’t need to continually check your corporate blog for new content.

Spending on online marketing, or trying to build your brand up through your corporate blog wasn’t a bad idea, just in case you’re wondering already. According to the latest market reports, and the opinions of some experts from this field, online marketing, and internet advertising almost by extension, has finally come out of the shadow of conventional TV and print media advertising.

As the world continues to be shrunk by the wonders of the internet, the online marketing industry is poised for exponential growth in the upcoming years as more and more companies are assigning budgets to reap the many benefits of online marketing.

The reason for the renewed interest in online advertising is simple: when done correctly, it is arguably the most cost efficient, effective, and accountable form of advertising around. Progressive marketers have learned this and are consistently intertwining traditional media with new media to create shockingly powerful marketing programs. But just like any other form of marketing, the key to online marketing is doing it correctly.

So what’s the secret sauce in a successful online marketing program? Understanding the client’s objectives and the websites capabilities are just the beginning of the process. Here are some ingredients of the recipe:

Specific Geographical Targeting through Local Sites

Local media websites have unique audiences and you shouldn’t be at a loss to understand why; there’s only two possible reasons. Local media websites are either doing an excellent job of providing their audiences with everything they need; or people must be very loyal to their news brand because they aren’t visiting multiple local media websites. The overlap numbers are generally less than 15% on most ad campaigns.That means that an online media plan consisting of multiple local media websites will get excellent reach in the market. And remember, that audience is predominantly local.

Online Advertising Campaigns in Different Sites Yield Different Results

Because local media websites have unique audiences, we build our media plans with similar Reach and Frequency tactics as broadcast buyers. To achieve high reach numbers in a market, we typically will include as many local websites as possible. Including 30 or more local websites on a market campaign can be a lot of work, but the payoff can be huge. Ironically, it’s usually the small sites on the plan that generally perform the best.

Branding Through Online Marketing and Advertising: The Next Big Thing

People remember banner messages and they do respond to them in more ways than just clicking. Many recent studies have shown that online marketing and advertising is a key catalyst for brand recall. Because of this, we often include phone numbers or other direct response information on the banner ads themselves.

Using Banner Ads for Online Advertising

While we never overlook the obvious benefits of online branding, at the end of the day, people DO click on banner ads. Well placed campaign on the right local sites at the right time with the right creative can see rates two to five times higher than average. The good news is that people typically don’t click on a banner ad unless they are truly interested in learning more about the message. This is all the more reason to have a compelling page on the other side of the click.

We’ll continue to bring you more of the latest in the world of online marketing and corporate blog strategies as well, so stay tuned.

So you’ve been running your corporate blog for a while and, owing to regular posts, good content and some spot-on SEO work, you’re generating a healthy readership (judging by the ‘hits’ anyway). But are you still using your corporate blog to the max?

Your corporate blog, as we’ve discussed before, is a great engagement device. It is one of the few brand-building tools that lets your brand interact so closely with your target segment. That is the potential; but how much of it are you utilizing?

One of the ways to better gauge just how much of a readership your blog really has (as in readers Vs mere visitors) is to really use the comments section to encourage reader feedback. This is a great way to actually get the engagement process flowing with regards to your corporate blog. Of course, it helps to keep in mind that your corporate blog is merely a platform for engaging with your organization’s brand in a broader sense. Merely engaging the reader to the blog, which may be enough for a regular blog, isn’t an end to itself in case of a corporate blog. From the SEO perspective too, comments are important as search engines tend to ‘trust’ blogs with comments more than the ones without.

First of all, a lack of comments doesn’t necessarily reflect on the quality of your content, just that you need to somewhat alter your approach. It’s all about putting your stuff across in a way that encourages participation. So while you’re posts may be informative and authoritative, a little modification to your writing style that leaves room for discussion may go a long way.

Here are some ways to get your readers more involved:

Pose a Question on Your Corporate Blog

Sometimes readers don’t know what to comment about. A few nice ones may thank you for the information and so on, but that’s not quite engagement. The question should be relevant to the particular post, but you can also find a way to work in a broader angle as regards your corporate blog or your organization. It is best placed at the end of the post, for the sake of pertinence, and also because that’s where it is likely to have the maximum potential for attracting attention.

Request Contributions

You can take interaction to the next level by actually asking them to contribute to a seemingly incomplete post on the corporate blog. Maybe you can even make it into a game or contest of sorts. The basic idea is to leave a post open-ended. A list, for instance, which corporate blog readers can add to is a good idea.

Reply Promptly

You must be quick to reply to a readers’ comment; the least you can do is thank them if further discussion isn’t possible. This actually leads to a feeling of ‘engagement’ with the corporate blog on part of the reader, as they’d feel that their opinions are being taken seriously. A failure to do so is liable to put a reader off. Try to address the comment poster by name and don’t forget to give the good comments a pat on the back; which brings us to the next point.

Corporate Blog: The Carrot Approach

As an aside to the previous point; some comments deserve more than just a thank you. And sometimes, you can go the extra mile to convince readers to really work their brain cells and to overcome their hesitation. A contest for best comment, the promise of reward, and following that up with action is what’s often required. The prize can be as simple as the commenter (or comment) being featured prominently in the next post.

These endeavors may, in some cases, come across as desperate due to their overtly obvious nature, so go easy on them. Their rarity in itself has to be an attraction. With the advent of social networking, it has also become possible to do this a little less obviously. The Facebook plug-in for your comments section, for instance, would ensure commenters try extra hard just for bragging rights (and likes).

Your corporate blog has to be more than an organizational diary or newsletter. It brings your customers, both existing and prospective, closer to your business than anything ever has before. Use that to gain an insight on consumer preferences that wasn’t available through the best of statistical market research till now. Your corporate blog can do all that and more.

Let us state at the outset, before we delve further into the nuances of podcasting, that anybody managing a corporate blog ought to know about podcasting and all that it can do for your corporate blog.

Introduction: What’s a Podcast?

Although the basic concept of a digital broadcast goes back as far as 1998, it was Apple’s iPod portable music player that gave the name podcast to this phenomenon and really pushed it into the limelight. At its most basic, a podcast is a digital transmission of media content that can be received over specific devices called podcatchers. These may be portable media players such as iPods and other portable devices of its ilk or any other device with access to the internet and capable of playing said media.

Podcasts & Your Corporate Blog

Over time, podcasts have been reinvented from simple media broadcasts to an outreach tool capable of delivering targeted content to a pre-selected segment that an advertiser or brand specialist wants to focus on. It can also be used by general purpose bloggers to reach out to their readers by providing them ‘podcasted’ infotainment content. In a corporate blog, both these applications can come together beautifully to further advance the basic purpose of a corporate blog, which is to reach out to a certain demographic , fulfill your brand communication objectives to some extent.

Lastly, the way to do better podcasting is through the content that you are going to provide your audience with. Basically, better podcasting is always dependent on premium content, which can add a lot to your status as a very interactive and a very genuine internet personality.

Unique Podcast Content to Make Your Corporate Blog Stand Out

To make better podcasting through the use of content, you must first find your niche and reconcile the niche and the content with your broader brand objectives.

Another approach to take is to use podcasting to deliver content that helps establish your blog as an authoritative source for a particular niche. In terms of a corporate blog, it is pretty obvious that this authority has to be in terms of the line of business of the corporate organization that owns the corporate blog in question.

Over the years, podcasting has attained new heights. Nowadays, podcasting is more competitive, and only better and more significant material is worthy of scrutiny of the viewing and the listening public. This is why one should seek better podcasting, so that his intended audience will go his way.

Increasing traffic to your corporate blog helps you raise awareness of your company and its products and services. You do have to be committed to your blog to make it successful, though.

Using your company blog in your public relations campaign is not as easy as slapping some copy on your website and hoping people will read your brilliant posts. There are several ways you can increase traffic to your corporate blog and take advantage of the blogging craze so you can attract new customers.

Update Your Corporate Blog Frequently

Your company blog is not your personal diary that you can update when it’s convenient for you. There’s nothing more deadly to any blog than one that hasn’t been updated or a post that reads, “It’s been a while since I last wrote…”

Set a schedule and stick to it. Not only does this help you blog frequently, your visitors will know when to expect updates on your blog.

Do Not Use Your Corporate Blog for Sales Pitches

You can indirectly promote your company and products through your blog but don’t use your blog as a direct sales tool. Keep your content genuine and don’t use the space as a blatant advertisement for what you’re selling.

Your goal is to build repeat visitors. Using your blog as commercial space will do the opposite. Your blog is a powerful public relations tool, which means it’s not a giant billboard for you to spread your advertising message.

Find Your Niche, Don’t Generalize

People blogging about their personal lives can be all over the place in their blog. One day they may blog about their favorite TV show and the next day they share their story of how they couldn’t decide between a frozen pepperoni pizza or a TV dinner at the grocery store.

That’s fine for them. They’re not you, a company trying to make a living selling your products.

Do people really want to know what you’re up to in your daily life? Unless you’re a big name, think Bill Gates or George Clooney, then the answer is going to be no.

Your blog will better serve your potential customers and your business if you use it to blog about topics relevant to your industry. If you own a hardware company, for example, a blog focusing on home improvement projects will help increase traffic. Even following up with your customers about their own home improvement projects through pictures and interviews will also make your blog more popular.

Engage Readers by Encouraging Feedback

Your blog readers have opinions. You can encourage people to keep coming back and get involved by engaging your users. Type your blog post and then ask readers for their comments on the story or what they think about a certain topic.

Use polls and your message board posts to get people communicating. If you accept reader questions, answer those questions on your blog and open up the floor to others to give their own answers on what the reader has asked.

Spin Searched Subjects Into Relevant Content for Your Corporate Blog

What’s hot right now? Are these subjects something you can spin into your own blog’s topic?

Using our hardware store as an example, hurricane season results in a lot of searches. Spin those searched subjects into content for your blog. Tips on preparing your home for a hurricane or even following a city’s rebuilding through your industry’s eyes can be excellent content that drives visitors to your site.

Look at the most searched content carefully and be creative when coming up with ideas related to those popular searches. You don’t want to go too far overboard but you can spin a lot of subjects you wouldn’t normally think to cover. Look to Google Trends and Yahoo Buzz to see what the top search words are this week.

These tips are over and above the SEO techniques that you must use get your corporate blog to rank high on Google for the relevant keyword. The difference is that these techniques take over from the point where a reader sees your blog listed in the search results, and then goes on to read your corporate blog.

As corporate recruitment practices go, resumes are pretty much the primary contact between the company and a potential candidate. From the candidate’s point-of-view, the resume is the main tool that they use search for jobs and introduce themselves to would-be interviewers, if it comes to that stage. The candidate, on the other hand, would easily find a lot of information on the company. There’s the website and the corporate blog, there are industry news reports, and a plethora of data out there on the WWW.

Corporate Recruitment: The Limitations of a Resume

After all, if the old adage about just how long first impressions last is true, the amount work that goes into making and refining a resume is hardly surprising. However, this opportunity for repeated refinement is what makes the resume an unreliable tool for assessing a candidate, something that the managers in charge of corporate recruitment understand well. It presents an incomplete, and all too often, overtly embellished picture of the person in question.

Yes, it does bring the folks in corporate recruitment up to date with the salient points of an applicant’s education and work details. They may make for a useful reference point with which to begin an interview, but recruiters know better than to form any concrete impressions at this stage.

Personality Traits Judged During  the Corporate Recruitment Process

Corporate recruitment programs are designed to spot suitable talents among the candidates for a given profile, not mere people who’ll ‘do a job’. Thus, scanning beyond just the resume, and reading between the lines are some of the skills that are a must for those working in corporate recruitment.

An unsuitable hire is more than just a mistake; it is a liability. Getting it right the first time is what the corporate recruitment people get paid for. That said, there are some important traits that a resume cannot shed light upon. This is, of course, under the assumption that the resume in question is impeccably written and does not betray any signs of exaggeration, resume bloating or false claims.

What the Candidate’s Resume Won’t Tell You

Here some facets of an applicant’s personality and work experience that do not shine through on paper:

1. People skills: A resume may list all the awards, achievements and recognitions that a person has to his/ her credit, but you won’t be able to judge whether they’re team players who can be productive within the bigger picture or if they’re lone-wolf types who’d rather go it alone than suffer the company of others to perform the tasks at hand.
2. Ability to Handle Pressure: How would a person do when forced to think on the move, and solve problems that have no precedents and hence there are no scripted ways of tackling them.
3. Integrity & Moral Fiber: These qualities cannot be judged by reading a paper description of a person, no matter how well written.
4. Work Ethic: No resume would tell you if the person who otherwise reads like a recruiter’s dream-come-true on paper is actually a habitual gossip who spends the majority of the productive hours goofing off and distracting others.
5. Charisma: It may come across as unimportant or secondary, but a candidate’s people skills and ability to think on their feet depend on this to a large extent. This is another hard to gauge quality that a skillful writer may nevertheless manage to convey through a well-written cover note.
6. Leadership Ability: Corporate recruitment specialists are looking to hire people who are not just good worker but also exhibit positive leadership traits, as any organization wants to recruit tomorrow’s leaders. This is something a candidate has to try and convey in the interview.

So while corporate recruitment involves looking at the  person beyond the piece of paper that tries to adequately (and often unsuccessfully) define that person, prospective hires would do well to try and put their best foot forward with the resume itself. Stress on strengths and achievements that you would like to elaborate upon in the eventuality of being called for an interview. Above all, try not to make it an impersonal account. It is a description of you, after all; make sure the flavor goes through.

Keep reading this corporate blog for more on the various facets of business blogging, online marketing, corporate recruitment and other topic pertaining to Human Resources.

The top echelon leadership of a company usually doesn’t have much time for much else other than the bigger picture and the bottom-lines.  Numbers and figures — conversions, revenues, turnovers, profits, etc — are of paramount importance to every business organization; indeed, the very reason for its existence. No business entity can survive if the required ‘numbers’, especially profits and revenue, are not up to the mark.

Role of Leadership in Identifying Talent

However, it is no secret that it is human element of the organization which delivers the numbers. If you have the right set of people, adequately motivated and under a manager whose leadership skills can effectively channelize the collective energies of the group, the numbers will happen. Which brings us to the operative phrase in this scenario: the right set of people. Even exceptional leadership qualities would go down the drain without a team with specific talents that complement each other. That does not mean that leadership and the talent being managed are independent of each other or that any leader has to make do with the talent he sees in a given team. To the contrary, spotting and managing talent effectively are two abilities that a good leader must have in his skill-set.

As your role in a given organization grows to a point where you lead a team, there is a certain shift in focus. When we talk of being in charge of a group, we have already established that they have a common objective that somehow is a vital part of the larger picture of what the organization does. Your team has a collective target to meet, which means that all individuals must do their bit, while you ensure that everything flows smoothly.

The Human Side to Business Leadership

Effectively, your target is to ensure that the right persons get assigned to the right tasks such that the needful is done most effectively in the least possible time. Getting the right talent is only half the job: people are not equipment. They must be nurtured and groomed to perform and grow in their roles for the organization so they may perform to the fullest potential of their talents. You, the leader, must get to know every team member as far as possible and try to gauge what makes each one tick. You don’t want your best team members coming down with a bad case of workplace blues just due to lack of motivation. Good leaders are also a great talent master because they can determine a person’s abilities more precisely simply because they’re great at observing and listening. Once they institutionalize these skills, they help shape an organizational doctrine that translates into good employee practices, enriching the company culture.

Going further up, developing talent is a continuous process for the organization at large, and this process must be a part of the organizational culture; this has to be believed and made a priority from top down, starting right from the CEO.

It’s not just about short-term goals. Any business organization that is looking at the future must also plan to get the people with the talent to get it there. Talent masters spend at least a quarter of their time spotting and grooming leadership potential in others; it is closer to 40% in Fortune companies.

Some Guiding Principles

The guiding principles that the top leadership in a company follow in order to identify and nurture talent are as follows:

1. Achieve quality through effective delineation of talent. Have a standard mechanism of quantifying performance and assign leadership roles on that basis rather than rough approximations, hunches or personal preferences. Square pegs may fit into round holes at times, but it’s too much of a trial and error process to be used consistently.
2. Establish an atmosphere of easygoing trust. Developing talent and grooming future leadership needs an atmosphere of trust. You cannot assess your people without proper information about them. It not only helps you know more about the people working in the organization, but also helps camaraderie. Ask anybody who’s part of the top leadership in a company and they’d tell you this is the hardest part: encouraging people to get along while keeping the professionalism intact. Ensuring that nothing gets discussed out of turn and that confidentiality is respected takes a careful system of checks and balances that has to be there and yet be unobtrusive.
3. Be unforgiving, impartial and regular in assessing talent. Your must have a regular system in place that is as robust and comprehensive as any used for finance or operations or sales forecasts. And these assessments should be carried out regularly, no less so thatn any other assessment reviews that are done for operations or sales etc.
4. Give importance to Training & Development. The hours that go into T&D aren’t just a waste-of-time activity done by HR that eats into productive times: done right, it would enhance productivity. Keeping pace with the rapidly changing business environment is paramount to maintaining that extra edge you need and to grooming leadership for the future.

Stay tuned to this corporate blog for posts on business blogging, online marketing and business leadership.

Like it or not, workplace blues are often our own creation. Working your way to success in a corporate environment is challenging enough without us adding to our own difficulties. The tough part is, it happens inadvertently, as a result of a variety of factors such as flawed conditioning, deep seated insecurities and a reluctance to take charge of your own matters. This is where, we’re hoping, our corporate blog could help you.

Traditional conditioning since childhood places too much misplaced emphasis on being modest about one’s achievements. A lot of workplace blues stem from employees feeling underappreciated, and trust us when we say that all you have to do is go ahead and do more than just hoping that your work would do the talking. At the same time, certainly do not talk if you haven’t the achievements to back you up.

These self-limiting mindsets are often the first reason for self-created work-related stress and the resulting workplace blues. Thus overcoming them would put you on the right path to beating workplace blues. Read on to know some of them.

Workplace Blues: Your Manager should be Interested in Your Appraisal But He Isn’t

If you ever thought that your boss must manage your career, you thought wrong. This whole system of reports and evaluations and feedback may give you that impression, but you really do need to take charge of your employee appraisal process. If nothing else, it will take away a lot of the uncertainty and lack of understanding, both of which contribute to workplace blues.

To begin with, gain a working understanding of how the appraisal system works and the key parameters that go into quantifying your performance. Once you have it all pat down, prepare in advance for your appraisal interview. Prepare meticulous notes on your performance and how it has benefited the company; put revenue figures where you can. Then take initiative to approach the concerned superiors to discuss your progress over the year or a quarter.

You Don’t Make an Effort to Improve Your Visibility to Management

As mentioned before, some of the leading causes for work-related frustration is that workers feel continually underappreciated and short-changed, not to mention invisible. Such workplace blues are particularly acute where the leadership is ‘results-oriented’ while putting little emphasis on the processes and the people who make those results possible.

It is your priority to ensure that your contributions to the results get their due attention. Nobody is going to go digging as to what your part in the proceedings was; moreover, being too reticent is seen, in a corporate set up, as being too laidback, a definite flaw.

Don’t be pompous or go stepping on others’ toes. All you have to do is keep you superiors in the know as far as your progress on a given project is concerned, and you have done away with one possible factor contributing to workplace blues

You Make a Habit Out of Missing Opportunities, hence the Workplace Blues

Workers have a tendency to function in a very one-track manner. They’d be so focused on their current job roles and department that they lose track of the larger picture, adding to the mix of factors responsible for workplace blues. It is good to concentrate on the task at hand and complete it with sincerity, but it is a multi-tasking worker’s world. Try to keep track of how your contributions influence the company overall and be aware of key issues and projects. Network outside your immediate team and department and it will serve you well. You must keep an eye out for new initiatives and try to be a part of inter-departmental teams that are often formed for project specific reasons. When such opportunities arise, be sure to step forward. Many people behave to contrary: far from taking the initiative, they make excuses regarding existing work load even when offered an opportunity. These opportunities are a stepping stone to getting noticed by the higher-ups as a go-getter.

Remember, the spotlight of your achievements will be focused on somebody else if not on you. So neglecting to take credit for them and then smearing the person who does through the workplace gossip grapevine is counter-productive. Of course, it is unfair to you, but you bring that upon yourself. But more than that, it also harms the long-term interests of the organization in question. As a professional, it is your duty towards yourself and your company to ensure that your achievements are duly credited to you.

By taking care of all that is discussed here, you stand to eliminate a fairly decent number of factors that lead to workplace blues.

In an ideal world, your corporate blog would be a work of creativity that would push the envelope on online marketing communications. Unencumbered by political correctness and minor technicalities, it would be the one channel you’d use to directly talk to your consumer; brand communication at its best. However, the person who thought of this ideal scenario probably never had to contend with the legal department and the furies they could visit upon anyone who incurs their wrath.

Of course, GM’s Bob Lutz or Larry Ellison of Oracle never have to deal with that either when they blog; they outrank anybody and everybody in the legal counsel department.

This post, therefore, means to act as a guide of sorts for the mid-level product manager or corporate marketer who seeks to create a corporate blog with all the goodness of the medium, and still stay on the right side of Legal. For it turns out that free speech isn’t always so free after all, and for all the prevalence that the garden variety corporate blog enjoys, the legal review process is a veritable bone of contention.

In your position, you need to Bloggers need to recognize that “sanctioned corporate” blogging is different from publishing a brochure or issuing a press release. Those documents go through a review process before being set in stone, and sometimes do undergo legal review.

Blogs should never go through a “sanitization” step (or they aren’t really blogs and you shouldn’t bother doing them), and a successful blog will usually include largely unmoderated or semi-moderated comments from the public.

Here are some steps to allay your own fears of Inquisition 2.0 and help your Legal team through their own fear and loathing of Enterprise 2.0 social networking:

Lest There’s Trouble in Corporate Blog Paradise

Legal is too often perceived as a roadblock and left out of the process until they discover it after the corporate blog has been launched, and then they are obliged to sail down from on high with the wrath of an avenging angel.

Understand that Legal’s job is to mitigate risk, not to stand in the way of progress or profit. They know that, and all they usually want is a well-articulated business reason for your corporate blog and a chance to offer advice on the safest way to conduct it.

Don’t Go Looking for a Fight

Don’t take an adversarial stance—you will lose. Just make sure that you are armed with the business justification. Make sure that you can articulate the purpose, topics, and tone of the corporate blog. If you don’t know these, you aren’t ready to blog.

Every corporate blog should have a business purpose and a “marketing plan.” That doesn’t mean it needs to be overly “corporate” (who would read it?). A corporate blog is the least formal means of corporate communication, and it’s intended to be very human—it should reflect who you are.

Though the best blogs are “edgy” and compelling, just check in to make sure you’re no more edgy than your company can tolerate.

Get Your Superior to Back You Up

Set up a legal review and bring along your boss (actually, the highest corporate champion of the blog that you can collar). Treat Legal as problem-solvers and advisors, not as adversaries.

As knowledge workers, they probably read blogs themselves and have actually been waiting for someone to show up at their doorstep with this very issue.

Corporate Blog: Know What Can or Cannot be Said

Make it clear that you understand what can and cannot be said in a blog, and if you don’t know, ask your legal folks for advice.

Public companies have very strict SEC guidelines about what can be stated by a company spokesperson. Private companies can also get into trouble for what their employees publish through a corporate medium.

Always protect your employer’s interests! Legal is much more likely to get past the blogging medium if they know you are someone responsible they can trust.

This advice, of course, assumes that your Legal folks are reasonable and knowledgeable and somewhat attuned to the broad ideas of your marketing approach and how the corporate blog fits into it.

The ways in which your corporate blog can be a play a crucial role in your marketing communications strategy are manifold. It helps you improve search engine presence, projects your organization as a business concern with a customer-driven culture, and gives you a viable platform for enhanced target audience engagement by regularly giving them useful information and having the thought leaders speak to them directly. This element of accessibility  brings you closer to your audience and enables you to share brand stories with them in a decisively direct manner. Basically, while your article marketing and submission efforts merely act to direct traffic to your website, your corporate blog can be so much more by being the online voice of your organization.

Here’s how you can get more out of your corporate blog and get closer to realizing its full potential.

Write your corporate blog in an authentic voice

Brands are built on the bedrock of trust, and there’s no trust without authenticity. Your corporate blog ought to be in a conversational tone without being vetted by PR or legal concerns. Don’t make the mistake of being phony just for the sake of looking cute. For instance, when Dr. Pepper launched a new flavored-milk product called Raging Cow, their blog had a “cow” post random comments about a cross-country trip. It made for some amusing reading, but didn’t really inspire a lot of trust.

The Corporate Blog as a Market Research Tool

Politicians have learnt the value of ‘trial balloons’. An idea is leaked and the public reaction, which can range from appreciative murmurs to cries of outrage, is analyzed to ascertain if it would be safe to proceed. Use your corporate blog to ‘think out loud’, sharing tidbits that are not available elsewhere: it can be anything from discrete information about an in-the-works product or glimpses of a near-future marketing blitz. The comments that come your way provide you with free feedback that reaches you directly without being doctored and without a layer of insulation in between.

Achieve Subject Matter Expert Status with Your Audience

Relevant original content delivered in an authoritative (yet friendly) tone establishes your corporate blog as a trusted and authoritative source among your readers. When this happens, you can expect a fair degree of organic growth in traffic. Apart from your own SEO and off-page optimization efforts that help direct traffic to your blog, your readers act as the brand ambassadors for your corporate blog. Links to relevant posts by your corporate blog are quoted on discussion forums. Readers would ‘digg’ and ‘like’ your posts; they’d maybe even share it on their Facebook walls or tweet about it. This exposes your blog to so many other people who you had never tried to reach out to directly. For that to happen, however, you must have solid, original and irrefutable content on your corporate blog.

So these are some of the points you need to keep in mind for effective brand-oriented blogging. For more on writing the perfect corporate blog, corporate finance, and related corporate news, keep watching this space.