Global PR Blog Week 1.0

Thought Leadership, Evangelism in Blogs

[Note: This posting aggregates three separate postings: Thought Leadership, Evangelism in Blogs, Creative Passion, and Contextual Relevance.]

Thought Leadership, Evangelism in Blogs

Almost everyone, even personal blogs, are 'evangelizing' something - whether that is their favorite presidential candidate, the strategic value of enterprise I.T., or their love of knitting.

Let's say that your company or a client is interested in either starting their own corporate blog or 'pitching' ideas to the blogosphere (the collective virtual space inhabited by bloggers).

A common perception among those new to blogs are that they are frequently updated websites and thus follow the general guidelines for website content that most professionals are familiar with. While blogging software may be used for purposes of website content management, I'm using a more specific definition that aligns with the top 6 characteristics of blogs outlined at CorporateBlogging.info - namely, Personality, Voice, The Links, Conversations, Frequency, Feed.

There are five factors to consider for success with a corporate blog that is used primarily for evangelism and thought leadership as I defined those terms in my Q&A.

These factors will be discussed in greater detail in subsequent posts:

1. Creative Passion
2. Contextual Relevance
3. Constructing Bridges
3. Continuous Mindshare
4. Iterative Engagement

In addition, it's important to remember these points as well.

1. Your product/service is the primary message; it needs to be a story that begs to be told.
2. You are the message.
3. You don't always initiate the conversation.

Creative Passion

I outlined the importance of passion fairly well in a previous post. I'd like to highlight and expand on a few points made in that post. Blogging can be fun or it can be a tedious unrelenting chore.

You're not going to have much luck forcing employees to blog, even if it is part of their job description, if they don't have the desire to do so. I'm a big stickler for authenticity so I'll be honest here. I optimistically thought (even with the to-do list I had going) that I'd whip out these posts before I headed out on vacation to Ireland. But alas, I find myself sitting in an Internet café in Dublin because I made a commitment to participate in Global PR Blog Week. Don't get me wrong, I think the idea is incredible and it's an honor to participate, but under the circumstances right this moment - yes, I wish my vacation started a week out and I'd rather be strolling amongst the monastery ruins and lakes nestled in the Glendalough valley instead of staring at my laptop in a windowless basement.

That is not the frame of mind that you want employees to be writing from - sure, there will be a few posts where their heart isn't in it - but that should be the rare exception not the rule.

Why am I stressing this so hard?

• Blogs get abandoned quite frequently due to burn out, lack of interest, why am I doing this onerous obligation soul-searching and related reasons. I've abandoned one blog myself because the topic was too constrained for me and it ultimately felt like an albatross hung around my neck. Next time around it's fun. Most people underestimate the time and effort required to sustain a good blog. The only way the project is going to be ongoing is to make sure that enthusiasm doesn't wane. How do you do that? Tap into some aspect of your product/service that your authors and audience are enthused about. Employees will be blogging in their off hours if it's fun for them. Edwin K., the primary author of the Collaxa blog, actually used the words "fun" in describing his 2 and 1/2 years thus far of evangelizing the business process management and BPEL space. Fun, passion, challenge, enthusiasm: It's the only way the commitment will be maintained.
• You're competing for attention. There are over 3 million - amazing! - blogs tracked by Technorati now…god knows, there are plenty of bloggers that don't know to ping Technorati and are thus uncounted. For the majority of bloggers, this is a personal labor of love. They're not paid to write and in fact, their hobby takes hosting dollars in addition to their time and effort. Their motivation springs from love of something and it comes across in their writing. Your blog will be competing with those interesting, compelling voices for a share of the time folks devote to their blog reading habit. I was taking a random jaunt at Bloglines (if you are a user, you can see how many subscriptions others have) and I was surprised by how few blogs most people are subscribed to compared to my 300+. http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?id=evelynr" At this point, I am loathe to add any new blog to my roster - I'm already too overwhelmed. Bottom line: If you want to compete, your blog must also be interesting and compelling. (Even more so if the topic is already being covered fairly well.) The best way to achieve this is that the authors are jazzed about writing.

This passion factor is one reason that I advocate that each author have their own blog. The sense of ownership created by having your own space - a 'room of one's own' - spurs the author on and gives her the drive to create and build up their own body of work and their own audience.

With team blogs, it's easier to feel that if you don't post for a bit maybe someone else will pick up the slack. It's also a bit harder with team blogs to impart an individual personality and voice as well as engender a deep sense of ownership. For additional perceived authenticity and credibility (and perhaps to avoid legal ramifications), I even advocate having each individual blog hosted outside of the company domain.

Contextual Relevance

Your blog isn't for you - it's for your readers. You're looking for a match between your interests and what's relevant to your target reader in their context. Make certain you have a target reader in mind and an objective for your corporate blog. You've got to search for the 'bigger context' around your topic - the topic you're evangelizing or establishing thought leadership around.

I can probably best describe this through examples.

Before I leap into examples, I would caution technology companies in particular not to solely evangelize "the blue-sky future." In this industry, we tend to (at least I know I do) want to project out 5-10 years (or more) to where the world is headed. While that makes for fascinating reading and fun researching and writing, if it's the only timeframe you're discussing it will be harder to maintain a wider readership beyond futurists.

Relevance means just that - in your readers' mind they are wondering, what's in it for me? Everyone is aware they need to think long-term but I'd balance this with short-term "what's in it for me right now" views. Lay out your product roadmap from your current in production version out as far as you can and map your posts to balance between the present, the short-term 6-18 months and the blue-sky view of where your customer's world is headed.

When the Pivia Software blog started the objective was to reach influencers and blog readers such as press, analysts, and venture capitalists as we weren't certain how much of our customer base was reading blogs. So that was Step 0, knowing your objectives and readership.

Step 1 is choosing the overall theme for the blog. We did a little informal 'research' on the most popular blog search engines to determine which topics were already showing up in "conversations" in the blogosphere. On one hand, you probably don't want to blog on a subject that is oversubscribed. (Recommend: Positioning) And if it is oversubcribed, you will have to find your own niche to differentiate among the crowd. We probably don't need yet another generic social software blog, for instance.

I was looking for a topic area that matched Pivia's software and market strategy as well as a topic area that had at least a little traction among current blog readers. It's easier for a new blog to break ground and gain readers if there at least a few other blogs it can link to covering similar and adjacent areas of interest.

Now, that's a Catch-22 if you're evangelizing a new concept - you're not going to find much in the way of current conversation. There's not going to be buzz around it…because, duh, it's new. It's so new, you may have even invented it. I remember clearly when Java didn't exist at all. Sun Microsystems put a lot of effort (pre-blogosphere) to educate the industry, build buzz and establish third-party fervor for the new language. So, at some point, new concepts, new technologies, new standards, new markets will be "unfindable". What then?

At Pivia we searched on terms like "application performance" or "application delivery" over a period of a few weeks - nothing. I had personally followed blogs for quite some time, but since I emphasized other technology interests it had been over 18 months since I tracked enterprise software or networking technologies. We extended the search to adjacent areas. Unfortunately, some of the adjacent areas are difficult to track due to their generality and commonality such as "user experience" or "Web applications" or "distributed enterprise" (and many blog search engines could stand to be beefed up). We also did research to determine the most influential blogs that covered enterprise software and networking topics. I checked whether press and/or analysts in the general enterprise software and networking areas had their own blogs.

Basically, I was looking for topics that already were discussed from time to time in the blogosphere to "hook" into and to kick start the blog into gear. These are also great indicators as to what people care about and are finding worthy enough to talk about.

Currently, the Pivia blog is titled Performance Matters for various reasons. It ties into their tagline "Because Performance Matters" but more importantly because it also it has broad connotations - the blog will discuss matters related to performance - and that can extend beyond just Web application performance - to the performance of your employees. Be careful when choosing a theme not too box yourself too narrowly - you never know where you might take your product direction.

A hypothetical example (no Kodak doesn't have a blog) is that Kodak's blog would be better served being about the general topic of memories and its related topics such as preserving a Kodak moment rather than specifically about developing film. If Kodak had several bloggers, then each one could focus in on niches around the broad theme and in that case, you could have one blogger focused on high-end photography for the professional geeks.

Another example. I'm passionate about "agile software development" as a methodology for software development - it's something that I'd love to evangelize. A quick search over two weeks showed that there is some conversation in the blogosphere but not a lot around that specific search topic.

And don't even attempt searching "software development" - that's an overloaded term and oversubscribed. At first glance, due to the sparse results from "agile software development" it might appear that it would take a lot of work to build up buzz and conversation around that topic, but a general understanding of the demographics of the blogosphere and knowing that the topic is being evangelized heavily offline in addition to by press and analysts would give me the confidence to start a blog specifically on this topic. My friends evangelizing agile project management may take longer to build buzz as more developers than managers are bloggers and familiar with agile software development, but there are ways to use current buzzworthy topics and add relevance to them.

Step 2 is choosing individual post topics. Continuing on the agile project management theme, authors (or an assigned market researcher) would need to be scouring blogs, events/conferences, press and analyst reports for relevant ideas. The trick is to think broadly and see the implications and patterns between two topics. For instance, a blog post by a 3rd party about the failure rate of new product launches could serve as a great launching pad for a discussion on why and how agile project management practices help ensure successful product launches (Curious? A biggie is collaborative feedback with customers). A 3rd party post on the difficulty of coordinating offshore software development resources could trigger a post on how teams are organized and projects managed using agile methodology.

You may have to just get creative after a while. For instance, it was hard for me to automate the process of finding relevant topics for Pivia. Lately, we're focusing on broad areas (for instance, the distributed enterprise trend, and the use of the Web as an application delivery platform) that are difficult to "Feedsterize". I hit upon an indirect tactic: I used the term "latency" (a term that doesn't result in 100,000 hits but is still quite relevant) as a way to automate some appropriate posts that could serve as fodder for posts for Pivia authors.

However, it is still vitally important to read the most influential bloggers and press to make sure you can jump into a current heated - and revelant - conversation while the iron is hot. Usually there are a few folks in each company that seem to read up more than others, it's helpful if those persons could pass along links to blog authors as well. (In fact, they should be bloggers themselves - as often the best bloggers are the most well-read!)

Of late, we've toyed with expanding the focus of the Pivia blog (perhaps as a temporary six-month intensive series) on all matters related to the distributed enterprise, especially around remote and mobile employees. This means we'd tackle topics that aren't even necessarily technological whatsoever but encompass (relevant to the end-customer) business and management issues related to distributed offices and the extended enterprise as well.

The art of contextual relevance is like art - knowing what to pull in, emphasize from the whole spectrum of reality and what to drop - and emphasizing what universally resonates with your core reader.

The best haiku have metaphorical power, because the concrete observation which is the subject has wider resonance. In this sense the haiku poet is like a great photographer: the art is in the selection. One could photograph everything and anything, but only those images that catch a universal significance, that show some balance of forces, are worth publishing. - Source here

Author: Evelyn Rodriguez | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink | 2 comments
Category: @ Evelyn Rodriguez | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging

 

 

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The Global PR Blog Week 1.0 is an online event that will engage PR, marketing and business bloggers from around the globe in a discussion about blogging and communications. The event is scheduled for July 12 - 16, 2004.

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