This was an interesting post done by Louise Julig for socialmediaexaminer.com on the 31st of August, which, while interesting, was a little off the mark because it missed a few salient points.
1. If you write it, do you have anything worth saying to your target market? If you don’t write it, your Content Officer (who would be responsible for writing and/or editing the blog, as I am for the School) has got to be a good writer and understand your business, trends and so forth.
2. Video blogs are good, because we live in a pretty visual age (we are starting to use them on our next online business school iteration, but the person making the video blog has to be comfortable in front on the camera. I, for example, look like the second coming of John Gotti. Voice is good, though. IWe’ll send you a link when we get the videos on some courses up on this web site, which our webmaster has has as a task for awhile.
3. If you or someone in your firm blogs, is the blog really establishing credibility for you and your firm, or is it just rantings and ventings? In the final analysis, the blog has to do something to influence prospects to buy from you rather than your competitor. Otherwise it’s a waste of time and/or money. Our blog has established credibility for us, although it’s taken about a year to do so.
4. If you say something really original and tag it well, are you prepared for a real influx of traffic? When we did the first Obamacare impact on small business, it got picked up by several sites, and our hits went from 2500 a month to 50,000. You’ve got to respond, or junk all those responses (I still have about 80 of them sitting in my inbox from July, sorry to say).
BTW, one of the comments to Louise’s blogs wanted to know how to get a blog up and running. First, use WordPress (which we use), or Hub Spot, because both are widely accepted and pretty easy to use for non-techies. Get a name for your blog that’s catchy and memorable, like Entrepreneurial News. Copyright it, if it’s a really good name (we have). Keep a list of topics on your desk or in a file. Get a Google Analytics account for your blog, so you can see who’s reading and whether you’re hitting the target market.
This is an excellent topic, Louise. To read her original article go to http://socialmediaexaminer.com/business-blogging-case-study/