Just 2 Things That Make Corporate Blog a Good Blog.

By Alex Polezhaev

Today I was discussing with my colleagues (I will never get this word spelled right!) the secrets of blogging and what we need this blog for.

In fact, a corporate blog is a crazy phenomenon. Just imagine: a company appears to be a live human being that has thoughts and happenings in its life that it wants to share with the rest of the world. In psychiatry, it is called ‘alternating personality’. Add to this the fact that a corporate blog is usually written by several people – and you get a complete mess of opinions, posts and all other kinds of things.

Ulterior motives of such blog evangelists as me are still unknown (at least, to me). So I won’t be discussing them here. Or anywhere.

So, you’ve got a corporate blog and from now on the entire world will know that your company is real! To be real, or to pretend real – your readers will decide this. And they will do it based on just two things, very simple things: style and content. You can’t fool your reader, and if you sound not frank and write wrong things – you’re just pretending to be real.

By style I don’t mean any Shakespeare’s language. Actually, anyone has his own style. The style of your company’s blog is your company’s style of work. You allow mistakes in your blog – then you’re ok with them in your business. That’s true for any website, but multiply this rule by 10 for your blog. With all this said, a corporate blog should still sound live. A letter to the world would be a good comparison. The world is inhabited not only by chief executives. There’s plenty of grandmas, kids and dogs. And don’t tell me they are not your target market.

Content. Well, I can tell you what I don’t like about content of our blog. It’s too much about being Russian and glorification of our organization. Of course this all should exist – to certain extent. And I believe we haven’t crossed the threshold yet. But one has to be very careful, especially about the glorification… People want to see information that they can use in their life. Reading about being Russian can be quite entertaining, but the value of this knowledge is… arguable. Speaking about technology-oriented blogs (like ours), I think the most valuable information is all sorts of how-tos, tips and tricks and hacks. After all, you pay us too much for our brains and expertise – and here, in our blog, you can get some pieces of our knowledge absolutely for free.

New opinions and disputes are welcome. I say, go ahead!