- 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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How Do You Ensure Quality Blog Posts?
Assuming you adopt the multiple-contributor approach, you now have a new challenge—making sure that all the posts are on-point and of an acceptable quality level. Given that some (if not most) of the people posting probably aren’t professional writers, nor may they have a traditional marketing viewpoint, this can be problematic.
First of all, you need to make sure that your contributors view the blog as something other than a stock marketing communications device. A blog is not a place for blatant promotion, or for self-serving corporate blather; it’s neither an advertisement or a press release. A blog is more a vehicle for personal commentary, which means your writers need to keep it real. (In other words, you probably don’t want your normal ad copywriter doing much posting.)
That said, you do want your blog posts to maintain a certain level of professionalism. It’s easy for corporate bloggers to go off message and get a little too personal; that is not a good thing, especially when addressing more sensitive issues. Your bloggers have to remember that they’re representing the company; it is a company blog, after all, not a personal one.
All of this argues for some sort of training and/or guidelines for your regular bloggers. You need to establish a blogging policy and provide guidance to your bloggers. That means helping them adhere to some semblance of a writing style (without being too constraining), post length, and so forth. You might even want new bloggers to submit test posts before you let them go live. And you definitely want your department to have a final edit (for grammar and style, of not for content) of all posts to the blog.
So give your bloggers some guidelines, then monitor them to make sure the guidelines are adhered to. Tell them you want posts of a certain length, then make sure you do a word count and be prepared to edit those posts that are above or below that. Let your bloggers know what’s expected of them, and hold them to it.
I’d also advise that you require all potential bloggers to be involved with the blog before they contribute. That means they should be reading the blog daily—not just the posts, but also reader comments. They need to know what the playing field is like before they get into the game.