How I Failed as a Corporate Blog Writer (in early 2000-something)
And the disaster of a blog debut that led to these (downloadable) blogging guidelines for your team
A smidge over a decade ago, two days into my job as a Content Strategist at…[Household Name Brand with a Cult-like Following— a.k.a. HNBWCLF], I was asked to launch our corporate blog. There were no guidelines or best practices widely available at that time, and so, with the support and enthusiasm of my Creative Director, I started winging it.
It started off nicely, with a lot of encouragement from our readers. What happened after that resulted in my zealous belief in blogging best practices for corporate/organizational bloggers (i.e. any blog where your views reflect the beliefs of the organization). Here is a list of some of the anxiety producing events that followed:
- Right away, I was ordered (by legal) to use (™) every time I mentioned “[HNBWCLF]” to protect our brand from dilution.
Because of this…
- I received several dozen comments calling out the blog as a tasteless marketing tool, full of “shame-on-yous” and the like. This resulted in …
- The legal department asking me to moderate the comments more conservatively, and even delete all the bad ones, as it was reflecting badly on the brand to have so many negative comments. After that…
- Our loyal cult-like followers (I mean these people had tattoos and wedding cakes in the shape of our logo), many of whom had their own blogs, started writing anti-[HNBWCLF] hate blogs, and also spamming my inbox with hate mail.
Because of this…
- Legal asked me to cut off commenting completely.
And so…
- I lost readers, and…
- I received more hate mail, much of which asked me to account for the company’s choices on their now-kind-of-infamous disaster of a young blog. (I had until that job never received a piece of hate mail.)
- Luckily, American Idol(™) was in its early years, and so we ran a weekly contest asking people to predict who would get voted off and who would win. We rewarded the winners with small branded swag (They actually made the best swag I have ever seen — I wrote a blog about it.) Because of this…
- I received my first ever Cease and Desist letter from the makers of American Idol(™) — or maybe it was from Fox Network, I can’t remember — written to me personally! And then…
- Legal, to my surprise, told me to ignore it, which made me very nervous — it was addressed to me personally, and I didn’t know much about how all that worked. Thankfully it ended there. No one every took me to court.
I think this about sums up my first month at that company.
Disclaimer: Their legal team was great — they were just on this disaster of a ride right along with me.
Some of the good things that happened were that I was able to engage in conversation with customers who were VERY passionate about our products, and respond to their requests for more information. But I was really flying blind. If I had had some guidance, I would have gotten a lot more sleep that year. It was a very public way to learn.
And so as the first blog I am authoring (as opposed to editing) for our Accela Design publication, I thought it was fitting to share how to go about writing blogging guidelines for your organization or team, in the hope that it might make someone’s job easier and allow them to sleep better at night. I have also shared a version of ours below and made a sample downloadable via a link to my Google Drive here and below. You can copy those right now, or create your own.
How to Create Simple Blogging Guidelines for Your Team
Step 1: Know your audience. If you don’t know them yet, then go get to know them.
Please don’t say that your audience is “Everyone.” It’s one of the quickest ways to get an eye-roll from someone who has done their homework. You need to be much more specific than that. There are more than a million generalist blogs that I will never want to read that were written for “everyone,” and even Facebook isn’t for “everyone.”
So please do a little digging in your souls and come up with a more laser-beam focus on your audience. (Let me know if a blog on that would be interesting.)
For example, our primary audience is:
“Designers (UX-ers, Content-ers, Researchers, Front-End Dev-ers): This means the people who are passionate about user experience, research, design, content, and front end development. Those who are masters of their craft, those just learning, and those working to stay relevant in this ever-changing landscape. People who are interested in designing for edgeless-ness, touchless-ness, zero-UI, augmented reality, and whatever comes next.”
Step 2: Decide on The Overall Message of Your Blog — Think long-term story arc, not just what-do-I-feel-like-writing-today arc.
- Ask yourself why you want to be blogging in the first place. Consider what you and your team WANT TO AND HAVE THE ABILITY TO write about that is consistently relevant to your audience. (What do they want to read about/know/obsess over/titter about on a regular basis?) In our case, that was civic tech, design, ux, data-driven methodology, research, content, front-end development, and methods thereof, among a few other things. I recommend brainstorming and white-boarding sessions with your teammates to decide what story you want to be telling about yourselves and your organization.
- Next, ask yourself what you want people to know about you a) as a contributor, and b) as a team. A good practice is to think about which adjectives you want them to use when they share this blog post with their social network. Working back from there, you can use these to decide on appropriate content and tone. That may feel overly simplified, but it gets pretty accurate results and it’s fun.
4. Consider that every blog you post is another chapter in your overarching team story. In fact, every sentence has the potential to appear on the cover of the New York Times in the best (or worst) case scenario. So you will want team members to review each blog entry, provide feedback, and make sure it reflects back to the original message you all agreed upon. For example, does it say “wow, they tried something cool, and learned a lot”? Or if you read between the lines, do you find, “I think we need to improve our internal processes, but we haven’t done anything about that yet”? Obviously, we want to be doing a lot of the former and not really any of the latter. Also, a good peer review can save you from embarrassing errors.
Step 3: Choose the right “medium.”
For us, the right place was medium.com, but that might not be true for you.
Each member of our team is an avid reader of Medium; we each subscribe to several feeds to learn about tools and processes, and we realized that WE are the audience of Medium.com, so we would likely find our audience there too. It also means that we feel compelled to share and give back to the folks we like to follow and read. We are into sharing and transparency, and we are here to learn. And this feels like the right place for that.
We are not here to write about our products or what they can do for your lives — that belongs on the corporate blog.
Step 4: Write your guidelines.
Here is an outline for you:
I. Goal of your blog channel
II. Audience for your blog posts
III. Overall message of your blog (think of this as your “story”)
IV. Length
V. Tone
VI. Refresh rate
VII. Tips and Best Practices for Beginners
Step 5: Download a sample of other people’s guidelines and see what works for you.
When I was a budding content strategist, I always wished there were more templates like this one because that is how I learn best. At this point in my 20 year career, I am enthusiastic about sharing content and templates in the hope of helping others cut their work time in half or more. Feel free to use all or some of it for yourself or your organization. Click here to be taken to my personal google drive for a draft template of group blogging guidelines.
FINAL WORD: A Brief Word On Managing a Corporate Blog
Writing, editing, and managing a corporate blog — not to mention managing, responding to, and curating the comments — is a full-time job, which one is usually asked to be done on top of your existing full-time job. Enterprise companies usually have teams of people who write them. Many of them all go through a rigorous editing and approving process. As a best practice, it is not ever as easy (or enjoyable) as popping off (or thoughtfully writing) your own personal blog.
Since my failed experience above, I have ghost written and edited several high-profile corporate blogs, but not before doing quite a bit more homework. As a content strategist by nature and training, with a deep love of and belief in the benefits of a good content guideline, I never did it again without reading as many blogs in the space and I could, and defining the goals, tone, and general rules of practice first. In addition to it being a best practice, it also can keep you from staring at your screen not knowing what to write about.
Enjoy.
