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.

In my previous post I speculated as to whether or not most customers would prefer to be sold on a product through a blog or a static office document, like a PDF or a Microsoft Word document.

We’ve executed some email campaigns over the past month to test this theory. Here are the details that I can discuss:

• Our sample size was significant (I won’t say how large exactly so don’t ask;)
• We conducted four trials with the same audience;
• Each trial had its own unique subject and content;
• We sent the email at regularly scheduled intervals;
• We used a blog entry and a PDF alternative;
• The blog and the PDFs that we used contained the same information but with two different presentation philosophies, like the ones I outlined in my earlier post.

Given all this, here are the results:

These numbers are all click through rates (CTR) of people who opened the emails sent during each one of our trials.

I haven’t provided enough information about our audience to make this test an official scientific marketing study for the general public; think of these findings as a weathervane indicator - this test only tells you what direction the wind is blowing, not it’s magnitude.

I performed another calculation which resulted in the headline for this article; here’s the formula:

AVERAGE(PDF CTR)/AVERAGE(Blog CTR) = 8.31

This means that for every person who clicked through to the blog first roughly 8 people preferred to click through to a PDF document with the same information on average.

What are the implications of this finding?

• It tells me that the people on this mailing list are not comfortable with the concept of a “blog” as an information delivery mechanism.
• It tells me that given the choice between an online blog and a PDF download, many customers feel more comfortable with a PDF or other static document.
• It tells me that perhaps marketers like me, who recognize the obvious advantages of blogs as an information distribution mechanism, need to find ways to make blogs more appealing to older, more affluent audiences in general.

If you’d like to discuss this in more detail with me feel free to hit me up with questions on Twitter or on the comments here. I won’t be able to disclose many of the details but I might be able to answer other questions.

I’ve always wanted an excuse to use a fisticuffs image on my blog - I guess all of that Yahoo/MSFT drama would have been a good time, but this will suffice.

I’ve tried three times to write a good, anecdotal lead-in for this post. I’m going to have to say “to hell with it” at this point and get to the point of the matter: “are most customers too old school to be sold products or services through a blog?”

The question stems from an ongoing discussion that I’m having with a few of my peers; we were asked the following question:

If you were to start a new marketing campaign with the objective of educating small business owners, executives, and managers on the benefits of your product, whatever it is, what medium would the better delivery medium:

• Professional, polished,  office documents that read like micro-brochures or
• A product weblog written in a personal, informal style that contained the same information as the brochures.

Naturally, I’m arguing for the blog, but I’m interested in hearing what all of you have to say on the subject.

Here are my thoughts on why a blog is the better of the two mechanisms:

• Blogs are easier to distribute electronically than static documents;
• Blogs are easier to update than static documents (you can’t update the documents to people who’ve already received distributions;)
• Blogs give articles give readers more opportunities to explore “your product”-centric content than static documents (more links in blogs;) and
• Blogs have built-in feedback-collection mechanisms, static documents do not.

Here are the arguments that I’ve heard in favor of static documents:

• Blogs are too sketchy for most potential customers who have the authority to buy;
• Many customers would prefer to print out a document and read it in their hands later;
• Most potential customers feel more comfortable downloading a document to their desktop and sharing it with their associates via email attachment than they do with sending links; and
• Most potential customers are more receptive to the professional, formal look-and-feel than they are to the informal style of the blog.

What are your thoughts on the subject? Please weigh in at your leisure.

But when I click on one of the links I see this:

Thanks for your interest in X; if you’d like more information about X or any of Company Z’s product, please call Y at (000) 000-0000 or email him at…

The Case for Creating Exclusion Barriers

I understand why companies create exclusion barriers for access to detailed information about their products; they create artificial extra steps simply to collect contact information for sales leads down the road. If I leave my phone number, name, and email address, the company will have everything it needs to contact me and subsequently market to me.

Essentially, by forcing me to contact the company in order to get more information about the product, the company is creating a new touchpoint in their marketing process. Great; so now the company can contact all of their leads, people who figure that the additional information regarding the product line is worth the time taken to contact the firm.

The Overwhelming Evidence Against It

The costs of artificial exclusion barriers outweigh the benefits. What does the company have to lose by making more information available publicly and hassle-free? Competition? Oh, please; like a single phone call is going to stop a determined, semi-competent competitor from getting access to that information.

Off the top of my head, here are a few costs of using artificial exclusion barriers:

• Deters Casual Browsers - The biggest cost is that exclusion barriers keep out potential customers who are interested in your product but don’t want the hassle of contacting your company. These browsers might be interested in your product, but as soon as they see that “call Susan at blah blab blah” message it’s game over. Why not let them get additional information on your product with no hassle instead of letting them walk away?
• Deters Potential Job Applicants - I couldn’t get any more information on the company’s product. When I apply for jobs, the first thing I look at, before salary, benefits, location, or anything else is the product. If the product is something I can get excited about, then I can look at other information regarding a position. If I can’t get the information I need about your company’s product, then I can’t get excited about the product and I’m probably not going to bother applying for a position.
• Makes Your Firm Look Like Control Freaks - By forcing the customer to step into your walled garden in order to see the fruit you immediately portray your firm as one that’s not interested in letting the customers arrive at a decision at their own pace; by making them go through gateways you make it clear that your firm must be in control of the marketing flow in order for any sort of transaction to go through.
• Hassles the Customer without much Benefit to the Customer - Simply stated, people don’t like having to jump through hoops to make your job easier.

If you’re making a website about your product, for the love of God just put everything out in the open and let customers browse through it at your own leisure; it’s easier, and puts the customers in control over the marketing process, and that’s honestly a better approach given the general “informing” trend that consumers across the board are experiencing.

del.icio.us Tags: Content Exclusion Barriers,Marketing Flow