Below is some quick information I compiled recently after a conversation with one of my Telligent colleagues, Mike Johnson. Mike works in Telligent's Interactive Gaming group and is working on a corporate blogging project.
In his words:
"The executive wants to launch a blog and he's excited about it, but a Corporate Communications staffer is a bit hesitant because she's not sure what the story would be on a weekly basis."
Ah, the dreaded, "we have a smart executive that can actually talk about our business but I'm not sure if he actually will" fear.
In my experience, it really comes down to institutionalizing that commitment as you move toward high profile corporate and leadership blogging. I've listed some things to think as you consider your own corporate blogging initiative.
-Discuss the topics to be discussed and decide the amount of depth to be explored.
- Create and publish an editorial calendar. This creates some transparency internally and will put the right pressure on the executive to get it done.
- Pull in the Corporate Communications and Legal group early to set some guidelines and discuss best practices.
- Perform a content audit that covers not only existing content that should be surfaced, but external content (RSS feeds,blogs,industry sites) that needs to be distilled down by the executive.
- Perform a broad-based analysis of other peers blogging in the executive's circle. ( Telligent recommends using a social media monitoring tool to provide ongoing insight and conversation monitoring)
- Decide who else will be involved in the executive's workflow. In other words, make sure there's a community manager to perform day-to-day activities like moderation, posting, etc.
- From a technology perspective, make sure you have a sustainable plan for extending the blog's reach. Too many times, the technology has limitations that hinder the ability to wrap other community elements around the executive's blog.
- Have the executive and the blogging team talk to customers. Think of this as a blog-oriented focus group. Many times the company's customers will have specific business issues and challenges they'd like to see a real executive address in a public forum.
- When all else fails, start the blogging initiative behind the firewall and help your executive get comfortable with the process. If it crashes and burns, you've only got internal egg on the executive's face.
And while I was compiling the content, I started by performing some quick Google searches and then moved on to more specific tag-based searches for things like "executive blogs" and "corporate" blogs". Those two tasks uncovered the links below:
Baseline Magazine article on executive blogs:
Delicious search for "Executive Blogs".
5 corporate blogs that built buzz (Dell is a Telligent client)
I hope you'll provide some feedback as you flesh out the pieces of your own social media strategy.
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