Back when I was just getting started blogging I made a mistake that I think many new bloggers make - I started blogging about blogging because I wanted to share my excitement, my new experiences with my developing audience.

Most new bloggers who get sucked into that morass quickly veer into another vapid tangent, namely the area of corporate blogging.

“OMG, this is so easy and effective - I can’t understand why every small businesses doesn’t start doing this right away!!”

I did it - I wrote about why corporations should have blogs without any first-hand experience as a corporate blogger. Thankfully, I’m not the first blogger to drink the Kool Aid and make that mistake.

Fast-forward to August of 2008

I’ve been working as a corporate blogger for a small software company since May. I have certain performance goals that have to be met each month (subscribers, sales) and my performance has been solid. However, this job has not been easy - not nearly as easy as many overly-enthusiastic newbie bloggers make it out to be.

What I’ve come to realize is everything that I ever thought about what it’d be like to blog for a business is wrong, and today I’d like to share some of the insights I’ve learned over the start of my career as a corporate blogger.

There are a number of myths perpetuated about corporate blogging that need to stabbed in the heart with a wooden stake, so let me begin:

Myth #1 - In the eyes of readers corporate blogs are just personal blogs authored by a corporation

Personal blogs are very straightforward - an individual or a group of individuals author posts around a central set of ideas with the objective of getting as many people to read the posts as possible.

Corporate blogs are a different animal. Personal blogs have a significant advantage - they’re authored by humans. Readers trust humans, not faceless, monolithic organizations like corporations.

Therein lies a whole set of challenges that rarely occur in the sphere of personal blogging - corporations have to continuously demonstrate their humanity just to catch up to that basic level of reader-author trust that personal bloggers take for granted.

Humanizing an organization, no matter how small, is a delicate operation which requires a lot of forethought and gruesome trial and error.

In addition, corporate bloggers have the additional problem of anti-corporatism innate to social media - people are more hesitant to subscribe to, link to, comment on, and vote on corporate blogs. That’s a fact. Unless a company is part of the “cult of free,” its corporate blog is going to have a much harder time finding the same kind of success as personal blogs.

Myth #2 - Corporate blogs are just like TechCrunch, ZDNet, CNet, TechRepublic, Etc…

The biggest misconception about corporate blogs is equating them to major news and commentary blogs like TechCrunch. Here’s the difference: even if TechCrunch and ZD Net are incorporated, those blogs are the business, not marketing mechanisms for the business.

They have the advantage of not having to use the content of their blogs to sell stuff - they have advertising to take care of that for them. The bloggers at all of those big publications rarely have to put themselves in the crosshairs at the risk of being called “corporate shills.”

Corporate bloggers run a much larger risk - they can’t distance themselves from their own monetization activities like how advertising-supported blogs can. Instead they have to put themselves into the fray and use their content to lead potential customers towards their own products while still retaining the trust and confidence of their audience. This is hard.

Myth #3 - Producing a blog post for a business takes about as much time as a personal blog entry

It doesn’t take that long to write a personal blog entry, and heck, a business blog isn’t really all that different - it seems pretty reasonable to assume that it’d take about the same amount of time to produce a blog entry for a corporate blog, right?

NOTHING could be further from the truth. Blog entries for corporations are time-consuming and expensive, because a corporate blog has to be 100% consistent with all of the company’s other marketing messages and because the corporate blog has to be treated as though every customer will read it.

In addition, there are some very tough objectives that have to be accomplished by corporate blogs - you want to use your content to lead people to eventually buy your product, but you just can’t shill it at non-customers mercilessly. Each piece of content requires careful planning and coordination at a level beyond anything I have ever done for Marketing Ninja, and it’s hard to describe just how difficult and time-consuming that coordination and planning really is.

When you write a personal blog entry you can do pretty much whatever the hell you want without significant ramifications, so long as you don’t do something absurd. When many of your readers happen to be paying customers the entire situation changes - they’ve given you money and now you owe them something of value - you can’t get away with writing any thing that comes off the top of your head, your readers often won’t let you.

Myth #4 - Traditional marketing tactics for personal blogs work just as well for corporate blogs

Ugh. I wish. Read point #1 again for background on this area. Here’s what doesn’t work for corporate blogs:

• Signing up on a social media account and submitting your own stuff  - doesn’t necessarily work well for personal blogs, but it’s not even an option for corporate blogs.
• The “Beg and Thank” StumbleUpon model - Most social media experts advocate a system that amounts to asking people to give votes to your article and then thanking them afterwards in order to retain them. If I think this is a bad practice for personal blogs (I do) then I also think that this behavior has the potential to be a PR disaster for corporate blogs.
• Commenting on Other Blogs - I’ve made it work for my corporate blog, but only because I have a methodical way of determining what blogs to comment on - I read a blog for a full calendar month before I even consider commenting on it. I don’t think most other corporate bloggers are nearly as diligent or proactive.
• Blog Carnivals - IMHO, blog carnivals don’t jive well with the required clean-cut, professional tonality of most corporate blogs. I’m sure there are exceptions, but that’s just my take.
• Classic Linkbait - List posts, link posts, gimmicks, and other types of classic linkbait are actually counter-productive for corporate blogs. Professionalism and engaging the right kinds of visitors are the two most important aspects of running a corporate blog, not blanket broadcasts. Some companies can actually pull off some pretty ingenious linkbaiting - Blizzard’s April Fools’ gimmicks are a fantastic example, but bear in mind their audience. What works for video game manufacturers doesn’t work for people who make CRM software.

Myth #5 - Getting paid to be a corporate blogger is just like getting paid to do your hobby

The biggest misconception of all - once you get paid to do your “hobby” then it is no longer your hobby. It becomes your profession. When you spend most of your time formulating blog posts, integrating other marketing activities into your blogging, coming up with content ideas, getting the IT team to make changes to the blog engine, and so forth then some of the original “fun” of blogging dies on the vine.

I enjoy my job immensely, but for different reasons than I enjoy personal blogging. I enjoy my job because I get to educate potential and current customers on the best practices for using our products and I see sales generated as a result; I enjoy personal blogging because it’s an opportunity for me to share my experiences and learn from them.

The satisfaction from professional blogging and personal blogging are two entirely different things and I am sure that there are some people who cannot make the adjustment from blogging as a hobby to blogging as a professional. Bear that in mind if you’re ever faced with the decision of doing this stuff full-time.

To Conclude

There are likely a ton of other myths that I’m forgetting to include on here, but I’ve spent enough time ranting about how big the difference is between “perceived corporate blogging” and “actual corporate blogging.” The point is that there are a lot of things that personal bloggers take for granted which corporate bloggers have to claw and fight for. So to all of you people who remain blogging hobbyists and personal bloggers - count your blessings and stop taking some of those nice bonuses for granted.

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