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With apologies to the couple of corporate blogs I do read, corporate blogs suck. I am talking about the SEO fodder, copywriter driven, press release whoring and/or link bait attracting garbage that are corporate blogs today.
I’ll read a lot of lousy blogs and standalone articles but I won’t read your company’s blog because even a guy who consumes as much useless information as I do can’t stand it.
You know why most company blogs just fail outright? They think people are interested in the information they have and they just need a better way to broadcast the information. If that was the problem, corporate blogging today would be great (well, an e-mail list would be better but you get the point).
That’s not what people are looking for out of a blog. Especially not a corporate blog. If you want to do that, you should rename your blog “Announcements” and just leave it at that.
Corporate blogs shouldn’t be about communicating a message or a brand, they should be about connecting with people.
That’s the difference between the few corporate blogs I will follow and all of the other garbage that is out there. The people that write great corporate blogs write as human beings with the purpose of connecting with other human beings. That means injecting self, opinion, personality and all of those other things that companies hate.
These people aren’t always the greatest writers or the best connected but they are good people. Those are the people in my industry that I want to connect with. The same goes for any technology (like Twitter for instance). People want to connect with people.
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Comments
04.07.10
I hate corporate blogs for the exact same reasons you listed here. Total agreement.
But I did want to ask you if you think that in general people would take even a more personally engaging blog seriously if it was a corporate blog?
Put another way, do you think maybe people would be tempted to just dismiss the person as a corporate shill and not want to engage them anyway? Do you think this attitude might be why there are not as many personally engaging corporate blogs?
04.07.10
Hey Lance,
Nice article, I have often thought the same of many, many corporate blogs. In order for people to read it you need to actually have interesting content, and it cannot be all about you.
I'm curious about your opinion of the Mobclix blog (blog.mobclix.com). I do social media and marketing for the blog and have been trying to build it as an industry resource and have interesting article (it's targeted towards the mobile industry and mobile developers most specifically). I've been having a lot of success with it and our numbers are growing. I'm certainly always open to tips and constructive criticism.
-Megan
@meganberry
04.07.10
Well put :-) I couldn't agree more. It seems to be the problem of communications everywhere.
04.07.10
The only corporate blogger I ever appreciated was Robert Scoble of Microsoft. I appreciated his stuff, because he just did not blog about what was good, he blogged about what was bad about his employer, on their own corporate site. Back in 2004, he called IE what is was, garbage compared to Firefox. He was right, but just by the fact he said it made a huge impact on his credibility. From that moment on, when he said something worked I believed him, because he did say when it did not.
I think it would be good if a Corporate blog said things that were not always flattering: “This is what our product does well, and this is where you really need to use someone else’s stuff until we learn a little bit more about this or that... In fact here are links to, two or three of our competitors who do that part really well. Keep checking in here, and I will keep you appraised with how we are improving.”
Now that would be a good content for a corporate blog.
04.07.10
@Ty - "But I did want to ask you if you think that in general people would take even a more personally engaging blog seriously if it was a corporate blog?"
No guarantees that a person won't be seen as a corporate shill but you're giving them less reason to believe that is the case. I think writing like a human means more people will actually read what you write. You still have to execute the content.
@Megan - You probably know your target audience better than I do (and it certainly isn't me). That's a good get on the Scoble interview though. The big thing is that most of your content is devoid of mobclix promotional bullshit (not all the way, but you're close). That's step one. Having interesting content written by a human is great. Amateur videos are a nice touch. I think you're on the right track.
@Elizabeth - Thanks!
@Paul - Credibility is huge. For me, good blogs inform and entertain. I just don't think you get great response if you say everything is great all of the time. Nobody believes it. So go in with the goal to entertain and inform your target (whether that be customers or future employees) and I think the shilling becomes less of an issue because it doesn't fit into that goal.
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