Steps to Finesse in Corporate Blogging

1. Treat corporate blogs with respect and be authentic.Blogs require a level of personality, sincerity and sense of respect for the community that is best kept real and not done by proxy. Blog readers connect with people, the flesh and blood of a brand. Companies should spend time finding employees whose style is a match with their brand and objectives.

2. Always blog with a solid, compelling case and proper resources. Have a good corporate blogging policy.Blogging requires a serious commitment of time and resources and entails taking on new risks. It’s a brave new frontier, so don’t expect the same old approaches to apply.

3. Choose your bloggers carefully. Smart corporate bloggers need to be trained, re-trained, and encouraged. And it’s a lot more than what’s required for media training.

4. Get the blog approved by someone who has some degree of subject matter expertise, knowledge of company policies and public relations.The reviewer should have thorough knowledge on these matters so as to spot potential problems. The blog should not be just a marketing and PR mouthpiece.

5. Do not censor blog comments. Admit mistakes, if any.The blogosphere expects a company to be honest about shortcomings, failings and issues. The blogosphere also will forgive companies when they admit their mistakes. One of the worst mistakes a corporate blog can do is to remove a critical comment on a blog. It smacks of censorship.

The impact of Social Media:
Social Media tools wield immense power in inter-personal relationships. They are primarily Internet-based tools for sharing and discussing matters of mutual interest. It refers to activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio.

In Internet marketing parlance, Social Media refers to a collective group of web properties whose content is primarily published by users.

Social media marketing has two important aspects. There is the on-page tactics through which a webmaster can improve a website. Such optimization can include adding links to services such as Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us in order to easily save and submit it to and for these services.

Social media marketing can also be done by fans of a brand or company who promote it through multiple online social media venues.

Astroturfing:
Some social media marketers offer to write content that is remarkable, unique, and newsworthy. This content can then be marketed by popularizing it or even by creating a “viral” video on YouTube and other video sites, including getting involved in blogs, forums, and niche communities. Many in the social media world consider this form of social media marketing ‘astroturfing’.

The many facets of Social Media:
Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, weblogs,wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few. Some examples of social media applications are:

• Google Groups (reference, social networking)
• Wikipedia (reference)
• MySpace (social networking)
• Facebook (social networking)
• Youmeo (social network aggregation)
• Last.fm (personal music)
• YouTube (social networking and video sharing)
• Avatars United (social networking)
• Second Life (virtual reality)
• Flickr (photo sharing)
• Twitter (social networking and microblogging)

and other microblogs such as Jaiku and Pownce. Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms like Mybloglog and Plaxo.

Social Bookmarking:
Social bookmarking platforms aggregate the bookmarking activity of all their members, allowing users to search for tags and find the most popular websites bookmarked under those subjects. It differs from a search engine, in that, a search engine delivers search results according to a sophisticated algorithym developed by Google, Yahoo, MSN and the like, but a social bookmarking platform delivers results based on the preferences of the peer group.

This is a colossal distinction because here we have the ultimate democracy. Never before have we had such real-time visibility of our own peer group. Social bookmarking and the internet in general have put the focus back where it belongs: content.

Social media tools like social bookmarking are making it easier and easier to sift through the endless piles of content to find exactly what you’re looking for and it’s becoming easier to find the good stuff, and sift the husk from the grain. The cream rises to the top.

Good Corporate Blog Example:
An example of a good corporate blog would be Kodak's Ofoto.com: Ofoto Blog is used to get feedback and resolve issues with Brownie, a new beta Mac application (found via BeConnected). It is quite friendly, competent and transparent.

A not so good Corporate Blog Example:
Now we have the other side of the coin, the bad blog. The pics from the following nasty blog might have been meant to poke fun at others. While this is possible, you can also look at them as some sort of what-not-to-do’s.

http://community.livejournal.com/bad_hair/

Bad extensions, bad haircuts, bad bleaching jobs, bad choice of hair dye, bad braids, bad hairstyles- all can be found in this addicting blog.

For more info on bad blogs, check out:
http://www.google.ca/
http://google.ca/