The other day I spent an hour or so checking out a lot of corporate blogs. I looked at blogs from brands in both the US and the UK and a whole host of blogs from agencies. As you’d expect there are many examples of excellent corporate blogs that act as a mouthpiece for the company – Mariott Hotels and ASOS are among my favourites. These often act a content hub with the posts then seeded through social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and (increasingly) LinkedIn.
However I would say that just under half of the blogs I visited hadn’t been updated this year. In many instances there were interesting posts, but they refereed to news stories that had moved on, or surveys that were out of date. Surprisingly some of the worst offenders are in the social media space with several agencies boasting websites that talk of community engagement and thought leadership, yet have blogs that are little more than online tumbleweed.
One of the golden rules of blogging is that you have to keep at it. If you have personal blog that you don’t update well that’s fine, but you will see readership begin to fall away, For a corporate blog not posting looks much worse. It says that the company has nothing to say or worse that it can’t actually get itself together to organise a proper posting schedule which makes it look incompetent. Either way it says that the company doesn’t especially care about its customers or suppliers (if the blog is focused on the business space).
It gets worse too. Corporate blogs especially are becoming a prime way in which brands break news to journalists and bloggers. With very tight deadlines and schedules those in the media can only spend a certain amount of time checking RSS feeds. If your blog goes quiet for a while you might find yourself culled from their RSS lists.
Then of course the issue of search engines. It is amazing how carefully curated blogging programming can organically propel a brand to the top of Google, Bing etc.
Blogging isn’t mandatory for all brands. There are many social media channels and they all have their uses. However I guess for most brands the prime use of say Twitter, should be engaging directly with customers while simultaneously promoting thought leaderships content. Surely most brands have messages and concepts that they want to communicate that need more than 140 charactars to convey them. So if your blog is unloved and poorly fed it might be time to put it out of its misery. You will be forgoing some excelent opportunities to promote your brand to customers and the media but at least you won’t have a part of your website that reflects very badly on your business.
Tags: blog tumbleweed, blogs, brands and blogging, corporate blogging, killy company blog
