By Mark Farmer, ACA

Posted May 1st, 2009

The medium you are reading is, in fact, a blog: do not be alarmed. Please stay calm and seated.

Despite the fact that we send Directions out every month via e-mail (using Campaign Monitor, my personal all-time favourite newsletter service), the landing pages for the stories are in fact WordPress blog entries (WordPress being my all-time favourite blogging engine). Hosting the stories in a blog allows commenting, content management, easier sharing, syndication and more. Pound for pound, blogging remains one of the best outreach mechanisms in the communications toolkit.

The Society for New Communications Research in California put together these best practices for blogging from the best & brightest in the industry. Enjoy a few of their words of wisdom: 

John Cass
Author, Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging
Personalization: Personalization is important in writing a blog, as blogs provide employees the chance to break down some of the barriers that exist between customers and companies. The informal style of writing that is possible in a blog can help reach customers who would not pay attention to a company’s statements otherwise.

Josh Hallett
Social Media Consultant, Hyku
Own Your Content’s Future: Make sure you own the domain name and future development path of your blog. Too many organizations start with a free or low-cost service and don’t own their domain name, i.e. , corporateblog.typepad.com. Spend the little bit of time and money it takes to control your domain and content.

Shel Israel
Co-author, Naked Conversations
Humanize: Remember that one fundamental reason for blogging is the humanization of the corporation. Be a real person when you blog. Show yourself doing a job that you have some passion for. Show your fallibility and, above all, do not fall into the trap of mediocrity, where so many corporate blogs wind up.

Mike Manuel
Social Media Strategist, Voce Communications
Corporate blogs should place equal emphasis on posts AND comments: Too often, companies focus so much energy and effort on writing blog posts that they neglect the importance of actively watching and responding to blog comments. I think the difference between a good blog and a great blog has less to do with the value, tone and frequency of posts and a lot to do with how an organization demonstrates it is listening, reflecting and addressing related discussions. More often than not, I think this begins by simply paying attention to blog comments.

Giovanni Rodriguez
Co-founder, Hubbub
Scale: Whether yours is a small or large organization, you need to understand that social media is a tool for everyone, not just the official spokespeople or the PR team. Smart companies who understand this (e.g., IBM) are turning their businesses into “communities of communicators.”

Debbie Weil
Author, The Corporate Blogging Book
Don’t Obsess Over Your ROB (Return on Blogging): Although you can use proxies to measure the ROI of a corporate blog in dollars, the reality is that a corporate blog is still a soft marketing strategy. It’s many things: a direct, real-time conduit to customers, a conversation with customers, a brand enhancer (if you execute well), a way to improve search engine rankings, a way to get media attention, etc. These will ultimately translate to the bottom line even if there isn’t an exact calculation.

- Mark Farmer
- Communications Specialist

Mark is responsible for the ACA’s electronic communications and bringing the world of social media to its membership. He is the founder and ‘chief webhead’ at webness.biz, and has worked in the fields of corporate communications, web design and social media since 1995. Mark currently sits on the advisory committee for multimedia programs at Humber College, and is a member of the Society for New Communications Research.