Blogging. I'm still amazed businesses don't have them.
Blogs are a relatively cheap method to drive traffic to your website. By utilising free blogging software such as Blogger or WordPress the only expense is the time it takes to set it up and begin populating the blog with content.
Benefits at a glance
Non legal or reputational risks include:
I’m not a lawyer (thank goodness!), but legal risks could include
Overall employee blogging should be seen as a significant asset to the organisation rather than a risk to be avoided.
There are excellent Search Engine Optimisation benefits to help boost the rank of your “parent” website via optimised linking. This can be achieved by developing targeted anchor text linking strategies to relevant pages at your website.
Of course the blog itself will also rank at search engines for various key phrases, usually in the form of the long tail (defined as quite long key phrase searches – 5 words and above) which are often low volume, but highly targeted.
Blogs are an excellent form of online marketing. Posts can be spun into the social networking world, where other users can engage, share and comment on blog content. In turn this creates opportunities where other websites can link to the original comment, creating new links and increasing the search engine rank of the blog.
Your blog should also be categorized into topics. This allows for numerous people within your organisation (or experts on each topic) to contribute semi regularly. This lowers the burden on a single individual to continuously come up with ideas and contributions (a feeling I sometimes know all too well!).
Like most new things online, blogs take a little time to establish. In the early days, traffic and engagement will likely be quite modest.
Your blog will require time and discipline to maintain a regular and consistent posting regime. Often blogs will start well, but stakeholders can lose interest and contributions dwindle. The blog effectively fails which can be damaging to the organisation as visitors perceive a lack of long term commitment.
The blog will require contributors. Again this needs to be negotiated within your organisation so that contributions become scheduled and ‘habitualised’ rather than an ad hoc and inconsistent. I recommend you create a dedicated role where one person organises and oversees contributions.
Technically there are a couple of ways you can approach resourcing. You can
Benefits at a glance
- Great way to create and share content
- It puts you at the forefront of your industry (leader perception)
- Blogs are topical and relevant to your audience
- Over time, a blog creates a lots of content which provides ‘free‘ traffic and search engine optimisation benefits
- All sorts of content can be added an mashed up together; text, audio and video to make it really interesting
- Blogger (free and what you're seeing now)
- WordPress (free)
- BlogEngine.NET (free)
- Community Server (free & commercial)
- Graffiti CMS (free & commercial)
- SubText (free)
Non legal or reputational risks include:
- Employees could make personal disclosures about other employees.
- Disputes between employees and or internal departments could be publicized in the blog
- Employees have varying levels of writing skills, which can create a ‘patchy’ style across the blog
- Accidental or deliberate disclosures relating to an organisation’s inner workings could undermine confidence in the organisation
I’m not a lawyer (thank goodness!), but legal risks could include
- Employees could inadvertently make libelous statements in a blog about other people.
- Employees could inadvertently disparage competitors' products or services which could result in Trade Libel actions.
Overall employee blogging should be seen as a significant asset to the organisation rather than a risk to be avoided.
There are excellent Search Engine Optimisation benefits to help boost the rank of your “parent” website via optimised linking. This can be achieved by developing targeted anchor text linking strategies to relevant pages at your website.
Of course the blog itself will also rank at search engines for various key phrases, usually in the form of the long tail (defined as quite long key phrase searches – 5 words and above) which are often low volume, but highly targeted.
Blogs are an excellent form of online marketing. Posts can be spun into the social networking world, where other users can engage, share and comment on blog content. In turn this creates opportunities where other websites can link to the original comment, creating new links and increasing the search engine rank of the blog.
Your blog should also be categorized into topics. This allows for numerous people within your organisation (or experts on each topic) to contribute semi regularly. This lowers the burden on a single individual to continuously come up with ideas and contributions (a feeling I sometimes know all too well!).
Like most new things online, blogs take a little time to establish. In the early days, traffic and engagement will likely be quite modest.
Your blog will require time and discipline to maintain a regular and consistent posting regime. Often blogs will start well, but stakeholders can lose interest and contributions dwindle. The blog effectively fails which can be damaging to the organisation as visitors perceive a lack of long term commitment.
The blog will require contributors. Again this needs to be negotiated within your organisation so that contributions become scheduled and ‘habitualised’ rather than an ad hoc and inconsistent. I recommend you create a dedicated role where one person organises and oversees contributions.
Technically there are a couple of ways you can approach resourcing. You can
- create or install a dedicated server (probably a bit of overkill for most) or
- put the blog can live on a shared server, or
- use free software platforms (such as blogger or wordpress) can be used to host your blog.
posted by Chris Thomas - Reseo at
11:35
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