blog

There’s a reason why companies are more likely to turn to Twitter and Facebook than corporate blogging: corporate blogging isn’t easy. Twitter and Facebook let you churn out bite-sized pieces of content without forcing you to think fully or comprehensively, let alone communicate a message clearly and distinctly. Well, that’s a limitation of Twitter and Facebook, frankly, not to mention most social media marketing strategies.

When you turn to social media marketing, especially in the B2B space, there’s no substitute for having a blog. Period. Without a blog as the cornerstone of your social media marketing efforts, the rest won’t get far. The effort associated with corporate blogging comes with clear benefits, particularly that you’ll be able to say everything your target market will need to know to make an informed investment decision.

When I ran into an article on Web 2.0 Journal, I basically saw enter:marketing’s approach to social media marketing staring right back at me: it has to be blog-centric, and here are six reasons why:

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It’s natural to want to entertain or inform your readers with the best content you can put together. Rather than push a product, the conventional wisdom holds, you want to engage, interact and make the world a better place for your clients.

And you do. You really do want these things. The only problem, of course, is that such lofty ideals aren’t free, and you’re the one stuck with the tab. So, you need to generate some revenue, and your corporate blog is one of the ways you do that.

To get the most out of your blog, however, you need to find that middle ground between pure advertising and pure news/information/education. Essentially, you need blog content that can unobtrusively deliver an engagement opportunity while still delivering value to your target market.

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Blogging isn’t for the faint of heart. You have to expect readers to engage on some sort of level if you’re doing it right. With that said, some blogs can be the Wild Wild West, which is what gives blogging a bad reputation in the board room and with executives that are stuck in the 80s. So, despite impassioned pleas to get a corporate blog off the ground, sometimes those pleas are destined to fall on deaf ears.

However, no mountain is too high to climb. To reach the corporate summit and gain approval (and maybe even budget), you need to know how to sell the corporate blogging concept to a guy in a tie who thinks the internet is dangerous.

Fortunately, it isn’t as difficult as it may seem.

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The purpose of a corporate blog or other social media presence isn’t merely to add to the endless electrons that are produced every day. And, it isn’t merely to provide a free service to the world. You’re looking to advance your business. While this may entail providing a free service consisting of informative and useful content, the net result has to be a lead stream for you to exploit. To turn your social media communities and traffic into business opportunities, you need hooks.

It’s easy to go overboard. In pursuit of leads, many companies tend to use their social media environments as advertisements, promoting at the expense of informing. Do this, and you run this risk of losing your audience — as well as your investment in the social media marketing initiative. When you create content and interact with your community, play it straight: deliver information that your readers can use — but don’t be afraid to make it easy for them to enter the sales cycle. This is where your “hooks” become useful.

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I’ve ghost written for a number of executives and companies, and the issue of voice always comes up – especially for corporate blogs.

I read a great article by Mark Herrmann (PDF) a few days ago about this (via WSJ). Before he took his current job, as chief litigation counsel Aon, he ran an excellent legal blog, Drug and Device Law Blog, in conjunction with his law practice.

Herrmann emphasized the importance of developing a voice. Focusing on voice over content, however, is among the greatest barrier to progress you can face when trying to get a corporate blog off the ground. Instead, you should focus on information.

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One of the biggest social media marketing mistakes I’ve seen companies make is to emulate the wrong blogs. Whether it’s The VAR Guy or Engadget, corporate bloggers look to popular independent blogs for ideas. To a certain extent, this is smart: the top blogs can have some great features and styles that are worth adopting. But, much of what they do can be unwise (or simply impossible) for you to implement. The reason for this is that different blog types carry their own objectives and constraints.

Think of content as a funnel. At the top is the widest sent of information available, the ability to write about any subject dealing with any company anywhere in the world. At the bottom is the narrowest of topics, tightly defined in order to appeal to the smallest of niche markets. This is how blogging works, with the mass media sites having the greatest flexibility in terms of the content they can use and corporate blogs having to hunt for ideas that are focused on promoting their capabilities while remaining sensitive to their clients.

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There is no shortage of IT marketing agencies on the market that would be thrilled to have you as a client. You get calls regularly, have listened to countless pitches and reviewed what feels like a never-ending stack of presentations on demand generation. So, how do you choose? If you have a partner in place, how do you evaluate its effectiveness?

The most important aspect of your relationship, of course, is the result generated. You are looking for a return on your marketing investment, and sluggish demand generation is probably an indicator that you need to take a closer look at your IT marketing agency. And, strong results may be effective now, but you need to think toward the future — is your agency equipped to help you grow and mature?

To help you answer these questions, you’ll find below five characteristics of an
optimal IT marketing partner. Take a look to get a sense of what you are receiving
from your current relationship.

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Doing video for the sake of doing video is a losing proposition. You’ll spend a lot of time and marketing dollars on content …yea, that’s it. Content. For most companies, videos are just moving visuals of what they’d normally express with words. Treat video as a different animal, though, and the opportunities open up. To make your videos valuable marketing assets, think of them as a cog in a four-part marketing machine that includes your blog, YouTube and webinars.

1. Webinars: This marketing tool is a known winner in IT marketing, but it has untapped value. Record your webinars, and they live forever.

2. YouTube: This environment is good for more than hosting. It will also send traffic to your blog and put you in touch with a wider audience.

3. Blog: Post your video to your blog – pulling it in from YouTube is very easy. Now, your blog is a multimedia platform!

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Forget about blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and everything else for a moment. Platforms come and go, and linking your marketing future exclusively to a tool could leave you at the mercy of a company that isn’t your own. Instead, focus on the content, and use that starting point as a way to reach your target market on whatever platform has the highest potential. As they enter and fall from favor, the impact to your company will be minimal, and while your competitors are scrambling to adjust to a new reality, you’ll find the transition to be nearly effortless.

It’s hard to imagine the decline and fall of Facebook or LinkedIn. They are just too popular right now. And blogs … they’re everywhere. How could they ever go away? But, as you know, shifts in media and technology are a fact of life. Newspapers were once thought to be unassailable. In the social media space, we’ve seen patterns change already, too. Remember MySpace? Once upon a time, nobody could imagine anything replacing it – and the converse proved true with unprecedented speed.

Don’t misunderstand me on this one – social media marketing is important; it’s perhaps the most powerful development in business-to-business marketing since the commercialization of the internet. To write it off as a fad is to cede at least some of your business to the competition. But, you have to have a prudent approach to this space in order to win, and that starts with not pinning your entire social media marketing strategy to the success of the platforms you choose.

Instead, start with content.

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