Corporate Blogging For The Busy Executive
July 10, 2008
Do you have a subject matter expert who has little time to blog, worse still, does any time spent on blogging take away time away from billable hours? Here are a few tips and ideas from my book on blogging and this blog about how to cut down the time it takes to blog.
• Build a profile of your community
• Start monitoring the community
• Understand the big issues in the community
• Align your blog content with your products in the context of those issues
• Find conversations within your community by monitoring or searching the community
• Decide when and how you will converse
• Write a post with a trackback, comment on a post in the community.
• Manage the monitoring and social interaction between your SMC and the wider blogging world. Find articles that would be of interest to your SMC, if they interject with a blogger continue the thread of the conversation by monitoring the conversation.
• Set up an editorial calendar, even if you don't need one because your blogger can churn out those posts, I think setting up the discipline of an editorial calendar will enable you to think about the larger themes in your blog.
• Remember to draw out the blogger’s personality in the posts. People don’t just read for the content, but also the context and relevancy. Some of the most successful bloggers are very successful because they reveal something about themselves on their blog, that revelation is often personal and means the blogger connects with the reader more often than not, trust is established and what ever the blogger writes about has extra credibility because of that trust.
Lastly the key to saving time is helping the SMC blogger to concentrate on creating the content rather than managing the monitoring, and social interaction. That does not mean the blogger does not miss out on important conversations, far from it, rather most monitoring involves a lot of idle chatter your subject matter expert does not need to see. Concentrate on reducing the time it takes to blog by helping them be more efficient with their time.