What we do know is that it’s all about content and offering continual quality, but is successful corporate blogging more about people than brand? Ann All over at IT Business Edge has been speaking to a number of key players for a piece on corporate blogging that she’s preparing to publish. A couple of early snippets highlight some interesting opinions that promise to spark some healthy debate.
Ann spoke to Paul Chaney, president of the International Blogging and New Media Association and the guy behind Conversational Media Marketing blog, and he simply put it as follows:
“People want to do business with people, not with companies or brands.”
See, I’m of the belief that the two are not mutually exclusive. I agree that audiences and consumers find it easier to connect with people than brands per se in a blog environment, but the ethos and spirit of the brand should intrinsically over-arch any good corporate blog, purely via nature in which the authors engage with their readership.
Ann also highlights what Bob Pearson, president of the Blog Council and former vice president of Communities and Conversations at Dell thinks about what’s important when companies are engaging with social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook.
“Lot of companies do RSS feeds to Twitter accounts and then don’t have a personality. We all like the human touch about Twitter. People want to know who is talking to them. They probably won’t pay as much attention to companies that just pump in all their content. Same thing with Facebook, where companies simply take their Web site content and put it into a Facebook page and try to attract fans. Why would people care?”
He’s right… to a point. The engagement can be personal and should be tailored, but it’s all about establishing appropriate rules of engagement for each social media tool (of course Twitter offers a completely different breed of involvement to Facebook) – it is indeed possible for companies to engage in these areas of social media outside corporate blogging by distributing content in these channels, but to “pump in all their content” isn’t by any means the best approach. It all depends on the nature of the content, the benefit to the reader, and ultimately engaging with the audience on their terms and feeding content tailored to their needs and interests.
(via IT Business Edge)