All Entries Tagged With: "company blog"
Sage Advice On Company Blogging From Matt Cutts
Matt Cutts has offered advice on commercial blogging in at least a couple of places. While I’m not a disciple of Matt (and I don’t necessarily recommend that anyone else be either), he does offer some good advice in this area. Consider:
- Don’t make hard promises
- Don’t trash talk the competition
- Don’t post when you’re angry
- When just starting out, proceed with caution
- Learn what matters and what doesn’t
- Don’t clam up over mistakes
This is all very good advice. And now, for the elaboration:
No hard promises - The future is bright. We know that. You’re improving, you’ve got great plans, but you can’t predict the future. An earthquake could shatter your building and you could lose all your research. Executives may decide to change midstream. Changes in the business climate could cause your company to modify plans. There’s nothing wrong with making tentative statements like “We plan to …” and “This should …” When in doubt, don’t make hard-and-fast statements that customers, suppliers, and partners will come to rely on. They will make decisions based on what you say publicly.
Keep the trash talk out of it - If your brand can’t stand on its own then you’re in trouble. No need to tear down the competition. But honest and fair comparisons are OK.
Don’t post when you’re angry – Sometimes people take cheap shots or get their facts wrong. If you feel you need to respond publicly to a situation, don’t do it when you’re angry. Let the anger subside. Or write the post you want to write and don’t post it. Let it sit for 24 hours then take another look at it.
Ramp up slowly. The best time, it seems, to make a big mistake is when you first start out. If blogging is new to you, don’t jump in with the controversial stuff first. Go into it slowly and work your way up to the hard stuff. Establish your voice and make sure your communications won’t be misunderstood.
Learn what matters. Some things are so trivial you’ll wonder later why you thought it mattered. Figure it out before you make a fool of yourself.
Allow for mistakes. You’re only human. Even if you’re the CEO of a multi-national corporation, you still have blood and bones. Mistakes happen. Don’t let it get to you. Overcome them gracefully.
Matt Cutts got it right on this one. This is sage advice that is applicable to small company bloggers as well as corporate bloggers. Even ghostwriters like us.
Journalists Using Blogs as Sources
To a lot of bloggers this comes as no suprise, but there are so many people who still see no value in blogging for themselves or even for their business. They see social networking and blogging as something people do if they have too much time on their hands. This is like people who thought the Internet was just a fad back in the early 90s.
I call news blogs and other blogs as Citizen Journalism. The news according to John Q. Public. Some see blogs as an unreliable source for news. I see mainstream media as unreliable when it comes to reporting the news.
Some mainstream news sources are far right and far left just as some bloggers are far right and far left, but usually the bloggers are much more open about being slanted one way or the other. Fox News calls themselves fair and balanced and even Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken want you to believe they are doing fair reporting on issues.
Then there are the reporters caught copying their stories or just outright making them up like the guy from the NYTimes that got fired after years of doing fake reporting. Then there are those reporters who were paid to write favorable stories about the no child left behind act by president bush.
So anytime you hear someone in the mainstream press talk about bloggers being an unreliable news source, remeber who is calling the kettle black. Here is a story about how journalists are now using blogs as a source for the stories they bring you in the mainstream press.
Brodeur Journalists Survey Identifies Blogs’ Influence on Traditional News Coverage
BOSTON, MA, Jan 08, 2008 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX) — A survey of U.S. journalists by Brodeur, a unit of Omnicom Group, suggests that blogs are not only having an impact on the speed and availability of news, but also influence the tone and editorial direction of reporting.
The survey is part of an ongoing research project by Brodeur in conjunction with >Marketwire to dissect and understand the impact that social media and blogs are having on traditional news delivery. The online survey was conducted among a random sample of North American reporters and editors, and was focused on understanding how social media and blogs influence their work.
Some journalists feel that blogs are helpful in generating sources or exclusives and see blogs as particularly useful in helping them better understand the context of a story, a new story angle, or a new story idea. It appears that reporters are using blogs more for ethnographic research than they are for investigative research,” Johnson commented.
Still don’t believe your company at the very least needs a company blog to put their press releases, announcements, and relevant stories into? Read on;
Johnson went on to explain that the survey confirmed something many have suspected — that new media (social media and blogs) is having an impact on many different aspects of reporting, particularly the speed and availability of news. Less than half of journalists thought that new media was having an impact — either good or bad — on the quality of news reporting.
Well the fact that any of these mainstream journalists admit that the new media or citizen journalism has an impact is a big deal. They are not going to readily admit that their news story may have been influenced by something posted in a blog.
Nearly 70 percent of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis. Over one in five (20.9%) reporters said they spend over an hour per day reading blogs. And a total of nearly three in five (57.1%) reporters said they read blogs at least two to three times a week.
Yet bloggers don’t have an impact on what they write?
Journalists are increasingly active participants in the blogosphere. One in four reporters (27.7%) have their own blogs and nearly one in five (16.3%) have their own social networking page. About half of reporters (47.5%) say they are “lurkers” — reading blogs but rarely commenting.
Yet bloggers don’t have an impact on what they write?
The majority of journalists thought blogs were having a significant impact on news reporting in all areas tested EXCEPT in the area of news quality. The biggest impact has been in speed and availability of news. Over half said that blogs were having a significant impact on the “tone” (61.8%) and “editorial direction” (51.1%) of news reporting.
“Like any new social phenomenon, the blogosphere has become a resource for reporters,” said Johnson, “but reporters are still creating their stories by going out and developing their own ideas and talking to their sources.”
Yeah right. None of them are lazy enough to not create their own stories. >Jayson Blair (born March 23, 1976, Columbia, Maryland) is a former New York Times reporter who was forced to resign from the newspaper in May 2003, after he was caught plagiarizing and fabricating elements of his stories.
“The blogosphere’s tail is not wagging the media body — at least not yet,” he said.
Not yet.
Another study found these statistics
While almost a third of journalists do not cover blogs, more than a quarter report regularly reading five or more blogs to research desired topics, and nearly 70% follow at least one blog regularly.
More than a quarter (28%) of journalists visit a social media or networking site, such as YouTube, Facebook and MySpace, at least once a week, while more than 44% visit at least once a month.
Nearly 16% of journalists receive five or more RSS feeds of news services, blogs, podcasts or videocasts every week, and about 37% receive at least one regular RSS feed.
While more than half of journalists never seek audio or video material from corporate websites, nearly 20% say they seek such material at least once a month.
While a large majority (76.9%) of journalists report that they use local newspapers to follow news, some 64% report that they use Google or Yahoo! online news services.
I’m not sure how anyone in business does not believe that having a company blog can benefit them greatly. If you think press releases are good and blogs are not, think about the number of press releases that go ignored each day by mainstream media.
They receive thousands of them each day and you pay big money for your press release writing and distribution in hopes that they will take the time to read it.
They can’t find the time to read those press releases because they are out doing social bookmarking and reading blogs. 
Start your own company blog and have a >professional blog writer manage it for you. It’s not too late for your blog to become a popular news source.
