Corporate Blogging

The book I read to research this post was Corporate Blogging For Dummies by Douglas Karr which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com . This book is about blogging as it relates to big companies. They normally use a specialist blog platform like Wordpress VIP or Compendium and will have a theme specially written for the job. One thing it says in the book is you must give the bloggers time to settle in and develop their style as bloggers. I know when I initially started blogging I tried to write about subjects and gradually found doing book reviews where I tried to give people an idea of some of the things that were in a book was better. Quite a bit of this book is on SEO, Google Analytics and landing pages, much of which I have covered in other books. They are important in corporate blogging where you want what you write to be read by quite a large audience. Google Analytics can be linked to many blogs and gives feedback on things like what people read and demographics of your audience. Of course with a big company you might want something more heavy duty like Omniture. An important thing is don't just regurgitate your sales spiel but try and put information in that people can't find elsewhere particularly about your products. You can compare your company to your competition although you have to be realistic about this and make sure the competition doesn't ridicule what you say. You should try and develop a chatty style where you tell people about every aspect of your company. It isn't just buyers you will visit your blogs and you should have a customized URL and preferably have blogs in the name to let people know what it is. Smaller companies might use a platform like Typepad or Moveable Type or even a self hosted Wordpress blog. You can get the Wordpress software which is open source and free at http://wordpress.org . Many like this option because of the huge amount of potential customization available and plug ins. I did quite enjoy this book which covers the topic well.