One of the primary ways that corporations can leverage blogging is as an extension of their corporate communications.
In all of the excitement surrounding social media, however, a common mistake that corporations make is losing sight of the fact that a blog is simply a way to transport a message. A corporate communications strategy should incorporate blogs and define their role versus letting the blog or blogger define the strategy.
In this post I will provide some advice for successfully incorporating a blog into your corporate communication strategy in the context of targeting both internal and external audiences.
I got my first real exposure to large scale corporate communications back at Microsoft when I joined the leadership team of their Global Accounts program.
As an organization, our goal was to bring together the sales, marketing, and financial functions of cross divisional teams who worked on the 40 largest global corporations that the company serviced. These 40 accounts literally had thousands of down stream entities across the world that were called on by 60+ downstream subsidiaries and over 1,000 employees. This model was further complicated by a partner ecosystem that consisted of tens of thousands of employees speaking a variety of languages.
Though we constantly faced challenges created by global currencies, corporate governance models, and a plethora of financial reporting nuances, one thing that we did very well was communicate. In a world prior to the uprise of blogs, our communication strategy consisted of Microsoft Word documents, emails, and a corporate portal.
Yes, I did just use all of those “freeze dried terms” in one sentence!
Regardless of how unattractive those means of communication seem now in light of modern day social media platforms, our communication was successful not due to the technology but due to our strategy, which clearly defined our goals, messages, and our target audiences.
Communications Goals
I am going to keep this very simple. Review your corporate and/or divisional goals and commitments. Then, ask yourself how communicating through a blog will impact these. Next, quantify it. This could range from increases in employee satisfaction due to increased transparency to increasing revenue through improving partner readiness.
If you do not have a goal for your communications strategy, get this sorted out before you move on to messages, audiences, and blogging.
“The Message” and “The Timing”
If you could get all of your employees, customers, and business partners into one room every week, what would you say?
Many executives actually go through this challenge on a yearly basis as a part of their “companywide meeting” or “partner briefings”. The diference in strategy is timing.
A corporate blog that only has a yearly or quarterly post is probably better referred to as a “repository” versus a blog. So, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if you are responsible for a corporate blog that communicates with employees, partners, and even customers, and you aren’t posting on a weekly basis, you might want to consider another mechanism.
With this said, we have to come up with a communications strategy that is geared toward weekly updates. Elements of this message could be some of the following:
- Individual/Team highlights, wins, and updates.
- Progress updates toward financial goals.
- Reviews of upcoming products or status updates of products and services currently being piloted.
- Call to actions for upcoming events or initiatives.
- Reviews of current events and how it impacts the business.
Does this sound a lot like a newsletter? One could make that argument. Still, a blog will have the following elements that differentiate it from a “PDF sent via email”:
- Blogs have one or more personalities.
- Blogs are a mechanism for talking with people, not at them. A significant part of your message will come from your interaction and responses in the open comments section.
- A blog post should probably be limited to one topic; newsletters are better suited for 5-6 topics.
Figure out your messaging strategy and your timing based on your existing corporate communications strategy. If you don’t have a corporate wide or organization communications strategy, starting one or more corporate blogs might not be the best idea.
Target Audiences
A very important part of corporate communications is defining an audience. This audience could be categorized as internal, external, or both. In many cases, corporate executives will want to keep messaging internllyl and tag communications as “Internal Only” and “Confidential”. This is fine for truly confidential information. Though there are all kinds of technologies for securing content and limiting access, I’ve never associated blogging with words like “limited access”. Thus, an “internal only” blog might have limitations and you might want to reconsider whether a blog is the right platform for this type of communication.
You can still have internally targeted communication that is appropriate when seen by individuals outside the corporation or organization. When it comes to “setting rules”, I prescribe more to the the Michael Hyatt approach, which says this isn’t a social media or technology issue as it is already covered in policies such as general employee guidelines.
Don’t let the concept of “blogging” get tagged as something that is out of control and that will put confidential corporate communications at risk. That is a modern world communications problem and not a blogging problem.
The following are four audiences that you should consider for your corporate blog:
Employees
Employees are essential to an organization and companies should communicate with them. A corporate blog that has elements targeted toward employees should convey messages that are important to an employees performance and should have objectives such as:
- Improving performance by providing knowledge and insight
- Communicating bigger picture goals and removing uncertainty
Peer Executives
In larger companies, the problem is often not communication within a group; rather, it is communication between groups. A corporate blog is a great way to provide transparency, share best practices, and encourage intergroup communications.
Partners and Service Providers
Though the leadership and employees of your partners and service providers are not part of your direct organization, they are vital to your success. If you treat them as an audience that is a hybrid between peer executives and employees, you can enhance the performance of your organization and improve overall relationships.
Customers
In some organizations, customers should definitely be considered as a target audience for your blog. From a corporate blogging perspective, this is probably more relevant to enterprise level customers where you already have an established personal relationship with the customer. Customers are different audiences than partners, employees, and peer executives. Thus, their communications might be limited to a subset of your message. I’m going to encourage you to read my upcoming posts on brand blogging or customer service blogging before you decide how you communicate to customers through a blog.
Summary
Corporate communications is an essential part of business. Blogging doesn’t change the overall goal or the message. It is simply an enabler that provides a new format for your message and opens the door to conversations versus one way messages. As I always say, get your message right on a napkin before you take to the fast paced world of the blogosphere.
If you fail at a corporate blog, it isn’t the end of the world. If you succeed, the upside can be huge for employee satisfaction, corporate readiness, and inter-organization communication.
**********
Based in Dallas, TX, Derick Schaefer is a blogger and social media strategy consultant who founded Orangecast Social media in 2007. Derick is a contributing author to the business section of How-To-Blog.TV and can be followed on Twitter at @orangecast .
