Managing Contributors to Your Company Blog
- Who Should Contribute to Your Blog?
- How Often Should You Post?
- How Do You Ensure Quality Blog Posts?
- Whats the Right Style?
- Managing Your Blogging Activities
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Do you have a company or product blog? If so, who writes the blog posts?
If your company is like most companies, managing your company blog is a hassle. Either you have too few contributors, resulting too few posts, or you have too many contributors, which creates its own problems. Who should be writing posts for your blog, and how do you get the posts that you want? That’s the challenge—but one that’s easily resolved, if you have a game plan.
Who Should Contribute to Your Blog?
You’ve gone to the time and expense of creating a blog for your company, brand, or product. You know it can be an important part of your online marketing strategy; a well-written blog can attract lots of potential customers, and help you interact with your existing customer base.
The question, then, is determining just who should be contributing to your blog. Should you have a single primary blog author, or farm out posts to multiple individuals within your company?
There’s no single answer to this question; different companies do it differently. I have found, however, that some approaches are more successful than others.
Some companies assign blogging to the marketing department, which kind of makes sense. After all, it’s common to think of blogging as a marketing function akin to advertising, or maybe even part of your public relations activities.
Other companies leave blogging to the big shots. That is, it’s the company president or CEO who handles the blogging chores. This certainly lends a bit of authority to the blog, but may not always be realistic—how much free time does your CEO have to spend on the blog? (The reality is that most so-called “management blogs” are actually written by the management’s underlings—and everybody knows it.)
Still other companies leave blogging to their product people, or to the sales department, or sometimes even to human relations. (No, really.) There are certainly arguments to be made for each of these decisions—except maybe HR.
But here’s the thing. Blogging doesn’t have to be assigned to a single person. Many companies are quite successful in incorporating contributions from multiple individuals throughout the organization—including, in some instances, key customers.
Personally, I like the multiple-blogger approach. When you go this route, you allow lots of people within your organization to talk about your business—about what they do, how they interact with your company’s products, how they go about helping customers, and the like. You end up providing multiple perspectives on your business, which really works to humanize the organization. That’s a good thing.
It’s also a good thing to draw on the expertise of individuals who do—and are expert in—different things. Let’s say, for example, that you work for a car dealership. You can assign one person to blog about new cars, one to blog about used cars, one to blog about service-related issues, and so forth. Or maybe one person blogs about mini-vans and family cars, another blogs about economy cars, and a third blogs about sports cars. You get the idea; when you tap into the expertise of everyone in your organization, you offer a more useful and information blog.
With this approach, the more bloggers you have, the merrier. In fact, some companies even extend blog posting privileges to their most favored customers. There’s nothing like adding a real-world customer perspective to flesh out your blog’s content—and cement your relationship with those customers.
You can see how this multiple-author approach can create an interesting and multi-faceted blog. It also provides you with a lot more content than if you had a single person authoring all the blog posts. Let’s face it; if you have a half-dozen people blogging just once a week, you get a new blog post just about every day. It’s much more difficult for a single blogger to come up with that kind of quantity—and in the world of promotional blogging, you need to be out there with new posts on a frequent and regular basis.