Doriane Mouret

Marketing 2.0 was created almost 10 years ago, which might not seem very old to you, but if you think about it, it is equivalent to 70 dog years, and probably 200 tech years. So yes, it’s old. The positive thing about Marketing 2.0 is that if you use it you can be sure you will get some decent results. But you won’t stand out. Because shining requires efforts, creativity and innovation. It requires you to think out of the box and find new ways to surprise your customers. Well, don’t worry, some visionaries are hard at work to rejuvenate marketing practices, and are building what I call Marketing 3.0.

To understand what Marketing 3.0 is, let’s first talk about its older brothers. Marketing 1.0 was simple: a brand displaying a message to a customer. Marketing 2.0 added one dimension: a brand requesting an action from the customer. Marketing 3.0 goes even further: a brand using an external trigger to request an action from the customer that will ultimately create an emotional link between the customer and the brand. Here, a little graphic representation to make it clearer:
Thus, a typical marketing 1.0 message would be for example “Our product is amazing!”. Translated in a marketing 2.0 strategy, it would look like “Our product is amazing, like us on Facebook!”. While in marketing 3.0, we would have something along the lines of “Our product is on Facebook and we will give $1 to Amnesty International for every new like”. Hence you can differentiate Marketing 3.0 from its older brothers through 4 characteristics: Subtle, Unified, Dynamic and Mobile. Let’s get deeper into details.

1. The subtle Call-to-Action

We have known it for a while now, but a recent Nielsen study just confirmed it again: 92% of consumers around the world say they trust earned media, such as word-of-mouth and recommendations from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising. Hence it’s become very challenging to set up advertising campaigns without including a social media strategy. And when I say social media strategy, I’m not limiting it to the basic “Like us on Facebook!” and “Follow us on Twitter”. Marketers, please wake up: that used to be efficient… in 2009. Not anymore.

Today, the secret of an efficient social media strategy remains in our capacity of building subtle Call-to-Actions. The action of liking-following-sharing has become a collateral effect of another intention that has more value to the customer. One of my favorite illustrations of that new trend is the recent “PDA Day” marketing campaign by Nivea. The call to action is to promise that you will give a hug or kiss to someone at least once a week, or a day, etc. The action of sharing on your timeline is just made so that your friends can witness your promise.

Really smart, Nivea! However, why build a Facebook app? Building social campaigns hosted on third party websites will always involve risks in terms of control over the data and analytics. On top of that, we all know that people don’t use Facebook to interact with brands, they use it to talk to their friends. That’s why social apps are dead: now it’s time to do Social by Design.

2. Social Apps are dead, long live the unified world of Social by Design

For a marketer, there is nothing worse than creating call-to-actions that drive your visitors away. Yet that’s exactly what social apps are doing. When you give a “Like us on Facebook” link on your website with an URL redirecting to the Facebook application, you ARE pushing your visitors out of your website. Believe me, as soon as visitors end up on your Facebook page, they won’t see the “Like” button anymore. Instead, they will focus on the little red number in the top navigation bar notifying them about unrelated friend activity… And you’ll lose them immediately as they’ll start wandering around on the social network.

So no, social networks are not optimal for your marketing campaigns, and if you want to start performing better, you need to use another field of Marketing 3.0: Social by Design. Social by Design is when users don’t have to leave your website or application in order to perform social actions such as liking, sharing, following, G+ing, pinning and so on. Yes, it does require a higher skill set in order to integrate such features, but it’s not that complicated. Take this website, for example: if you look at the right side bar, you’ll find a “Follow” and a “Subscribe” buttons. –> Those buttons enable you to follow me on Twitter or subscribe to my Facebook updates without making you leave this page, and they are just simple plugins that I integrated to my CSS file.

But some companies are going much further in the social integration. One of the best examples of social by design is Nike+. Nike was a really early adopter in the field and built its own application with social plugins integrated directly within the app using social APIs. When you are on the Nike+ app, you can share your runs on your Facebook profile, get “Cheers” from your friends, and all that without leaving the app. Take notes!

3. Forget Static, Think Dynamic

People are always impressed by the unknown, the unreleased, the “never done before”. Hence if you want to get their attention, you need to come up with innovative tactics: email marketing, online ads, static landing pages, customized social media pages have all been over done in the marketing 2.0 era and won’t get the level of traction you’d like to get. As technology is becoming accessible to anyone in the world and people get more and more tech savvy, one innovative tactic stands out among others: Interaction. People start knowing how things work. They know how to use a mouse, a keyboard, and they want to interact with a page.

I do, too. So the day I received an envelope from the folks at wefightboredom.com including a card with a URL and a pair of “decoder glasses,” I had to check it out. I typed the URL in my browser, and it brought me to a landing page displaying a closed book. I opened the book by clicking on the front cover and the pages were almost completely blank. But as soon as I put the glasses on, I could see the message. The interactive agency behind this brilliant project is called VLG, and they do many interactive campaigns such as this one. Unified online/offline marketing campaigns, game dynamics, unique user interactions are some of many ways you can stand out in your marketing campaign. Just adding more videos on your website instead of text to improve the level of interaction is already a good step. Think Dynamic.

4. Be Mobile-Ready

The last but not least aspect of Marketing 3.0 is mobility. With a global market that will double in size in 2012 and be worth $20.6 billion by 2015, mobile is THE place to be for advertising according to Gartner. Yet, there are still too many companies out there that don’t provide their visitors with mobile-ready websites, making us have to zoom-in and scroll from left to right in order to be able to read what is on the page with our iPhones/Windows phones/Androids.  Today, not having a mobile version of your marketing website and campaigns can hurt the credibility of your product drastically – even if the product itself isn’t mobile.

It doesn’t mean that you have to build a mobile version of your entire website, but make sure to have your homepage, landing pages and contact page/about us optimally set up for mobile. Visitors on-the-go usually want to know who you are, find directions or contacts details, or are just clicking on a link you sent them via email.

Et voilà! So let’s wrap it up. In order to “refresh” your marketing strategy, try first to be more subtle; make sure to create unified campaigns offering a smooth user experience; don’t forget to make them as interactive as possible; and finally build mobile-ready versions for the main pages of your website. By doing that, you will join the early adopters that are surfing the waves of marketing innovation. When you get there, the next step will be to join the select companies, such as Nivea and Nike, that create the waves of marketing innovation. How so? Well, if you read me often you might already know the answer to this question: Just think out of the box.

Images courtesy 1, 2.

During this 5 article series, we’ve been through the long process of building a good corporate blog, and learned how to avoid the most common mistakes that would make a corporate blog fail, from strategy, to User Experience, through messaging and tone. We learned how not to fail, but now it’s time to learn how to succeed fast and efficiently. The reasoning is pretty simple: just forget what you’ve read up until now. To succeed, you need to stand out; to stand out, you need to be different; and to be different, you need to think out of the box, and implement strategies that have never been implemented before. You need to be bold and take risks which a majority of bloggers don’t dare to do: that’s what I call “the leader’s complex.”

5. Getting the Leader’s complex

In any marketing strategy, “being the first” is crucial in order to have your campaign stand out. Dropbox is a great example of a company that took advantage of both its position as a pioneer in the market of consumer cloud storage and the absence of potential competitors to get consumers’ attention. Beyond having a great product, Dropbox took the initiative to implement a social media strategy that had rarely been tried before – it was between 2007 and 2009.

The DropBox Story

A Community without a Product. The first innovation tried by Dropbox founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi was to build a community before the product was actually released. While many companies wait to have a fully launched and market-ready product before rallying their core users, Drew and Arash tested landing pages and a private beta program with early adopters that became their main evangelists afterwards.

A Video promoted on an Aggregator. The second brilliant idea released by the company co-founders happened when they launched their viral marketing video. No, I agree, creating a marketing video was not innovative, even in 2009. But the innovation came through the way they decided to share it: they launched a campaign on Digg, a website usually used to bookmark articles. “At the time, Dropbox was closed. After the video went viral, our beta waiting list went from 5,000 people to 75,000 in a few hours,” Drew explained.

Thus, using an innovative social media strategy can be highly beneficial to your business. The downside comes with the risk taken to implement that strategy. Indeed, if Dropbox hadn’t satisfied their early adopters, they were taking the risk of spreading a negative image of their product among a group of people highly influential in the industry.

When sharing content, these risks usually show when you transcribe unheard or unpopular opinions on your blog. Bloggers who think “out of the box” take the risk of being damned by the community, or even ignored. But if their ideas are relevant and founded, they could also become strong thought leaders. When blogging for a company, this risk is transferred to the organization. Thus, if your ideas fail at rallying the general opinion, you can damage your brand irreversibly. However, if it works, you will place your company in a strong position for the future.

Be Bold

Afterall, blogging works like life: whether you decide to do what has already been done, which won’t make you stand out but will ensure you acceptable results, or you attempt to execute an innovative strategy, taking the risk to fail, or succeed. Here are a few unconventional blogs that succeeded thanks to innovative teams ready to make some “bold moves”:

Marriott on the Move. In my third article, I explained how letting the CEO of a company be the main writer could have bad consequences on a blog strategy. Not only does it make your company rely on the CEO’s image, but it can also harm your brand if the CEO is not a good writer. Those details didn’t stop the hotel chain Marriott International whose blog “Marriott on the move” is written by Mr. Bill Marriott himself. And it works! Each article receives between 10 to 20 comments in average, showing a community of engaged readers that take time to share ideas and leave long comments.

On the go with Amy. Hiring a social media expert or a full-time blogger to create your corporate blog content was another main point of my third post. I highly dissuade to externalize your content development to someone that doesn’t belong to your company. The external blogger doesn’t come to the office everyday, therefore isn’t involved in the company culture and can miss some important changes in the company strategy. And there is nothing worse than a blog saying something that doesn’t align with your strategy. Best Western decided to try nonetheless by giving control of their corporate blog to Amy Graff, a long time fan – but not employee – of the company. In “On the go with Amy“, Amy talks about her travel experiences with her family, which drives a high level of engagement.

The Old New Things. In my first article, I explained how defining a relevant strategy when building your blog was crucial in order to make the most of it for your company, hence driving sales. I recommended to focus on creating relevant content for your readers, but also gave you tricks to incorporate your brands and your products in that content. That’s indeed a safe strategy to make sure your executives and investors see how your corporate blog can bring value to the company. Well, The Old New Thing doesn’t do that at all. The Old New Thing is an MSDN blog written by Raymond Chen, Principal Software Design Engineer at Microsoft. Raymond only shares his expertise and honest opinion in his posts, without promoting or linking to any Microsoft websites. It’s true, it’s sincere, and it works. No strategy, just good honest content.

Nuts About SouthWest. I really appreciate blogs such a the LinkedIn blog, with a clear, simple and seamless design. As I stated in my fourth article, simplicity enables faster page loading, and keeps your reader focused on the content. The airline company SoutWest doesn’t seem to worry too much about that, and decided to build one of the heaviest blogs I have ever seen: tons of images and videos everywhere, and a minimum of 10 calls-to-action on any given page. Some would think that this blog is far from offering a seamless user experience, but it’s an opinion that the recurring visitors and fans of Nuts About SouthWest don’t seem to share.

Dell on Google+. When starting a blog, it’s essential to build an entire social media strategy around it in order to optimize your exposure. The common plan is usually to build a Facebook fan page, create a Twitter handle and encourage the visitors of your corporate blog to “Like you on Facebook” and “Follow you on Twitter”. Well, forget that! Facebook and Twitter are so 2011! Dell decided to bet on the next trendy social network: Google+. The Direct2Dell blog doesn’t feature any Facebook page, and Twitter only gets some attention at the bottom of the page, while Google+ gets to have a prominent window at the top. Going “all in” on Google+ is bold, and Direct2Dell could be missing out some interesting Facebook traction as a result, but if Google+ becomes the next big thing in 2012, it will give the company a significant competitive advantage in terms of social media strategy. [UPDATE 05/08/2012] The Direct2Dell blog doesn’t highlight its Google+ page anymore: It was probably a temporary campaign to increase the number of followers on Google+.

According to a study conducted by HubSpot, companies that blog get 55% more traffic. But the study doesn’t mention all the work required apart from just building a blog platform in order to get this extra traffic. During this 5 article series, I tried to highlight the different aspects of building a corporate blog, and I hope I convinced some of you to think twice about your blog strategy. Now it’s time for you to choose. If you follow the recommendations given in the first 4 articles, your corporate blog will bring you interesting results, but you will never make your company a rock-star in the corporate blogging world. If you decide to be innovative and follow the advice of the fifth article, you take the risk of making your blog strategy fail, but you also open the door to new opportunities for success. Your turn: so what do you choose?

Images courtesy: 1, 2, 3, 4

The corporate blog landscape looks like a funnel. Most founders or marketing managers think about defining a general communication plan for their company blog, but only half of them take the time to build up a relevant messaging strategy, Among those 50% of good bloggers, only a few work at perfecting their tone to harmoniously match their messaging and initial objectives. If you are one of these warriors who carefully avoided the 3 first mistakes of corporate blogging, your company blog must be pretty impressive and I’d like to see it! (Links in the comments, please!)

Corporate blogs that have this level of expertise are hard to differentiate from each other. The blog strategy has been built and implemented to its maximum, and it’s now time to focus on another factor that is not proper to corporate blogging: user experience.

4. Neglecting the user experience

Most people associate “user experience” to beautiful design. In fact, UX implies much more parameters, especially when it comes to blogging. Thus, an excellent user experience on a corporate blog starts with a good timing.

Watch Your Timing

Leave your content alone, question your timing. When a blog doesn’t get the attention expected, the reflex is to think the topics tackled are not aligned with the readers’ interests and that changing them will solve the problem. Yet, when the blog strategy has been built carefully, content is rarely the issue and changing it would actually make it worse. There is another factor you can question when trying to improve your blog performance: timing. In a recent study, KISSmetrics highlighted the importance of publishing your content at certain times of the week in order to get maximum exposure. For instance, it is crucial to define where your current and potential customers are and gear your social media publishing toward them.

Commit to your blog, like, really. Many blogs are put aside of global corporate marketing strategies after 6 months because of a lack of immediate results. It is a mistake as most of them are actually about to give their first results at that particular time. It is essential not only to perceive your social media strategy as a long-term challenge, but also to commit to it. Frequent posting on your blog will drastically accelerate the efficacy of your blog. As mentioned in the KISSmetrics study, the more articles are published on a blog, the more visits it gets, the greater the chances are to increase visitor’s engagement and start the virtuous circle.

Improve the Details

Be Catchy.The current battle to win the SEO war sometimes makes companies forget the necessity of creating catchy titles in their blog. Yes, making sure your titles have all your keywords will definitely improve your SEO, but could also make all your potential readers dismiss your article because it didn’t catch their attention.

That’s what happened to The New York Times recently. The newspaper published a very interesting story, but got a significant part of its traffic stolen by Forbes. How so? Because Forbes, even if publishing a similar story, used a more catchy title. As Nick O’Neill explained on his blog, while the New York Times had named its article “How Companies Learn Your Secret“, Forbes titled it “How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did“. Now you get it, right? Being dramatic usually works very well.

Keep it simple. The rules that apply to a blog design are similar to the ones we use for websites in general. I am not an expert and won’t pretend to give you any design lesson. However, there is one thing I suggest to take into account: not everybody has the last generation of Mac Book Pro running the most powerful graphic card ever – well I don’t. Thus, I’d recommend to keep your design simple and limit the number of images in order to accelerate the loading time of your blog. A page that you can load in less than 2 seconds on your personal computer can take 10 seconds on another computer, and hence ruin the user experience.

Make it seamless. Limiting the efforts your readers have to provide is the ultimate way to stand out among other excellent corporate blogs. Here is the top 3 things that can annoy your readers when interacting with your blog:

• Not finding the RSS Feed. Don’t forget to provide a prominent link to your RSS feed everywhere on your blog so your readers don’t have to look for it
• Not finding the sharing options. Make the social sharing options obvious, both at the top and the bottom of your articles
• Clicking on “Tweet this” and not having the tweet ready. Make sure to limit the efforts your users have to provide to share your article on Twitter by providing a tweet “out of the box”. Here is the perfect tweet “out of the box”: “Title of the article http://short.url via @yourcompany #hashtag“. Avoid the standard “via @AddThis” or “via @Wordpress”, or the never-ending tracking links – if you need to track the link, then hide the tracking code in a shortened URL

And here we are! If you did follow the different pieces of advice provided in the first 4 articles of this series, then you now have the perfect corporate blog! Yes, I know what you are thinking: It’s a “5 reasons why” series and we only went through 4 reasons so far, so how can it be perfect? Well, this is when I get to use my favorite words and ask you to think out of the box. A good strategy, messaging, tone and user experience will enable you to build a strong returning audience, and probably be amongst the top corporate blogs in your industry. But it might be long. To be under the spotlight and rapidly catch the attention of not only your targeted audience, but the general online population, you’ll need to take some risks and be more innovative. Last episode next week! And don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS to be the first to find out!

Images courtesy: 1, 2, 3

Building a solid strategy for your blog and defining a specific messaging that differentiates from traditional advertising are key factors when starting a corporate blog. If you respect those two pieces of advice you should be fine… But you won’t stand out. To get the spotlight and make sure your visitors come back and engage, you can’t just provide them with a good strategy and messaging, you need to become an expert at blogging. This implies that you work on finer details in your strategy. The first one is the tone of your blog.

3. Using the wrong tone

To understand the difference between messaging and tone – or voice -, think about music. Having a good messaging coupled to a wrong tone amounts to making a rock band play their best hits using recorders… That wouldn’t sound good, right? The sound of a recorder is not made to play rock music, as certain voices are not made for blogging platforms. I still witness a lot of good companies which fail at defining their tone in their blog. Although their messaging is great, the bad choice of voice doesn’t free the entire potential of the blog. Here are some of the most common mistakes I encounter.

Don’t pretend your brand can speak

As previously mentioned, one of the main things a corporate blog brings to your company is a bit of humanity. It enables you to show your customers that there are people here to answer their needs. The problem is, if you sign as your brand’s name, then you just lose this advantage. When I read posts starting with “Submitted by Zynga, on Thu”, I just can’t help myself but imagining a Zynga logo with two big eyes and two arms, frenetically writing on a piece of paper… As far as I am concerned, a brand can’t speak and can’t write a blog post. So don’t be afraid to sign as yourself when writing an article on your blog. That’s what people want. They expect to see your point of view, your phrasing. They want to know more about personalities that drive your company and giving them that insight will prompt comments and other novel reactions.

This strategy should also be observed on your other corporate social media accounts. I highly recommend not to use “I” when tweeting with your corporate Twitter account, or to “like” things on Facebook while logged in as a Page Administrator. It’s important to share your personal points of view with your potential and actual customers, but be sure to use your personal account to do so. Brands can’t “like” and can’t speak at the first person. They are just institutions.

Don’t pretend to be your brand

Not giving any voice to your brand doesn’t mean that you should replace it by your own voice. I see many entrepreneurs that tend to use their corporate blog as a personal blog or a journal. Yes, people want to read some behind-the-scene secrets about your company, but you shouldn’t push it too far. Being very private and personal will without any doubt attract more readers and onlookers in search of some spicy anecdotes. However, this could have a very negative impact on your brand image: not only would it make your personal image overtake your brand’s image in your readers mind, but it would also make them come back to your blog not to get information about a certain issue, or to take part to the community, but to get some more spicy stories. Thus, it would kill your initial strategy, whether it was to increase thought leadership, brand awareness, or to create a community.

Here again, this rule should also be respected when using social media. I can’t count the number of corporate Twitter accounts that display the picture and name of their CEO: WORKetc, RecycledBrides are just a couple of examples among many others. By using the individual image of your CEO for your main corporate social media accounts, you prevent your company from the possibility of creating any strong brand awareness. Some brands such as Mashable did become successful despite heavily using their CEO image to promote the company, but what will happen when Pete Cashmore will leave? Don’t make your brand rely on your personal image, otherwise it will be unlikely to survive without you.

Don’t pretend to be a blogger

The best way to avoid the mistakes mentioned above is to hire a social media manager to write instead of you. The vast majority of small companies I know use their CEO or VP Marketing as the main writer for their blog. Having the CEO of your company writing punctual articles is really important to build a strong corporate image, and those posts should be focused on his professional experience as a founder, but the CEO shouldn’t be the person writing the day-to-day life of your company.

Finding the right balance between thought-leadership, brand awareness and community building on a blog is a difficult art to master. The social media manager will not only find this subtle balance, but also provide your blog with a tone that matches your strategy. For instance, if using a formal tone can be very efficient to drive thought leadership, it can also have an negative impact on community building. Conversely, a tone that is too casual will enhance your community, but can erode your thought leadership.

Thus, having your blog stand out implies that you have carefully developed your strategy and follow it religiously. You should always keep in mind your initial goals and messaging, and build on top of these a voice that will harmonize with your plan easily. As we saw in this article, the first secret of a successful blog is a smooth voice: we are always more receptive to a singer with a beautiful voice than someone who sings out of tune. However, this receptiveness also depends on another factor that should not be forgotten: the User Experience. Find out more next week!

In the first article of this “5 reasons why” series, I explained how the ease of creating a blog post was in complete contradiction with the necessity of building a structured blog strategy. A blog can be set up in 10 minutes, but creating a sustainable marketing plan for your corporate blog takes time and this shouldn’t be neglected. Similarly, the way you implement this strategy should be well-thought-out and meticulously respected. Yet, marketing managers, who have been working on traditional marketing platforms for 5, 10, even 20 years, still have troubles understanding the difference between implementing an ad campaign and creating blog content.

2. Mistaking a blog for an advertising platform

A blog is not an advertising platform. It is actually the opposite: put some ads on a blog and you will get even lower traffic and conversion than you might usually get through traditional advertising channels. Indeed, when browsing your blog, readers are probably trying to find some relevant information about a specific subject, or perhaps they are interested in your community and want to get involved. My point is: the last thing they are looking to do is buy a product. It is as if you were selling candies in a dentist’s waiting room.

However, many corporate blogs keep on publishing articles to directly sell their products, such as The Starbucks Blog (Not My Starbucks Idea, the other blog), or Zynga’s blog. Zynga goes even further by preventing its readers from commenting or liking the posts… Stop the disaster! A blog is made to give companies a bit of humanity, to make their customers think there are actually people behind the logo that understand their problems and are fellow human-beings.

Forget your Products, it’s all about your Customers

To succeed at corporate blogging, you need to engage your customers. They must be emotionally involved and become your “Briends” (Brand+Friends). What are people usually looking for when making new friends? Someone who shares their values, their passions, their problems… Right? Talk about your corporate values and how they show in your company culture, the problems you know your customers encounter, the hobbies you know most of your customers like, etc. An amazing example of company focusing on its customers’ interests is Nike.

In 2006, Nike launched Nike+, a platform designed to enable mutually valuable interactions between individuals passionate about running. The objective was to improve customer engagement and loyalty, and the project exceeded expectations: within a year 500,000 runners from 160 countries had signed on. Through August 2007, Nike had captured 57% of the US running shoe market, compared with 47% in 2006. By August 2009, over 1.3 million runners had uploaded more than 150 million miles on Nike+. The Nike+ blog, called Training, is updated by coaches who give advice about running and answer questions from community members. Most of all, it’s not necessary to own Nike products to be part of the community: the focus is a shared passion for running, rather than for that of a product.

Don’t get me wrong: not focusing on your products doesn’t mean your brand should disappear from your blog.  The Nike+ blog includes short links to Nike Running shoes online store on the sidebar. However, the brand is not prominent on the website, putting visitors in a position where they don’t feel compelled to buy products. And the funny part is: Not forcing your visitors to proceed to check out will actually make them want to! (this too broad of a subject for now, we will cover this in a later article)

Listen, listen, listen, listen… and answer

A blog is the best way to collect relevant feedback from your most loyal customers. By interacting with them, not only will you increase their engagement, but you will also learn and find new ways to improve your product. Some of them will even help you market your brand with some bragging social media posts about how they interacted with you. One of the most epic interactions between a customer and a company happened last summer: Morton’s Steak House greeted an unsuspecting customer with a meal at the Newark airport after he jokingly tweeted his desires. The customer blogged about it and it brought significant press coverage to the restaurant chain. Let your readers comment, and answer the ones that need to be answered. It works. Seriously.

Corporate blogging is trendy. According to the 2011 State of Inbound Marketing, the share of businesses with a corporate blog grew from 48% to 65% between 2009 and 2011. Does that mean organizations have begun to understand the advantages of having a corporate blog? Not really. The market now offers a wide range of technologies that make it easy as pie to create a blog; so easy that a majority of companies set one up before asking themselves the most strategic questions. In this “5 reasons why” article series, I will uncover some of the most frequent mistakes encountered.

1. Starting Without A Good Plan

After a couple of years blogging, I came to an obvious conclusion: most organizations have a blog simply because they feel they should. Some of them even think that a blog will naturally drive fresh organic traffic without too much investment. Thus, a vast majority of blogs just fail to perform, and are quickly ditched by their marketing managers, considered as an inefficient marketing tool. Fail.

Let’s start with the harshest truth: your corporate blog is not a massive traffic generator, and acting like it is will lead you to complete failure. However, a blog is the most efficient tool for recurring traffic. Your readers will come back because they like the content you publish. It’s your mission to build yourself an image that will stick in their mind.

Become a Thought Leader. If you lack of credibility and trust in your industry, your blog will be your best ally to reverse your image and make you look like an expert. To do so, you’ll have to publish relevant content about your industry, using figures, surveys, statistics, studies, and put your brand aside. Some successful “thought-leader” blogs such as Signal vs. Noise almost never mention their brand in their blog. This strategy is extremely efficient for companies targeting B2B customers. It won’t generate any direct leads, but it will make it much easier for your sales force to get in touch with potential customers that already read some of your online content.

Improve your Brand Awareness. This strategy is basically the opposite of the one mentioned above. In this case, you will create stories that you’ll use to incorporate your brand name and get your readers to know your products. One of the first examples that comes to mind is the TribeHR blog. This blog highlights all the obstacles and questions faced by HR managers, and almost all of the posts end with a call-to-action inviting the reader to try their product. After several times visiting your blog to find answers, your readers will get to the point where they’ll consider your product as a way to solve their problems, and won’t hesitate to try it out.

Create a Community. Building a community is one of the most difficult things to do with corporate blogging, but it’s also what will lead to the greatest loyalty rates, especially if you sell highly engaging products and have a massive consumer audience. Community members are the most cost-efficient evangelists you’ll ever have. Not only do they bring new customers to your base, but they also make them stay there by integrating them in the community. In order to get those evangelists to your community, you’ll have to create content that makes them feel they are special. My Starbucks ideas is one of the best examples of a blog only dedicated to building a community: readers are invited to brainstorm around the next innovations they’d like to see at Starbucks. The best ideas are released and the Starbucks bloggers then write about the success stories. It encourages the community to get even more involved on the platform in the hopes of one day seeing their idea released and mentioned in the blog. The perfect virtuous circle!

Thus, building a corporate blog requires some preparation: a social media strategy is not like any standard marketing plan. You first need to define what your objectives are and identify how your blog could bring value to your current marketing offer. However, the plan is just the initial phase of the entire process. The tricky part comes when you start implementing… To be continued next week!