Corporate Training discussing the content of your blog posting

Corporate Training

Designate an editor. Corporate Training blogs need an editor to monitor the blog and ensure posts pass whatever standards you set. It should be someone who's a well-respected thought leader because that person will attract readers and ultimately bloggers.

Corporate Training

Don't be too precious about it, but do have a purpose. Yes, a Corporate Training blog is a reflection of your company, but it's a less formal communication medium so you should experiment, take feedback, and adapt your blog as you learn. Our brand's promise is "Exceptional Experience" and, as an organization, we look at the world through that lens. Originally, we thought our blog would be an effective vehicle to share the thought-provoking conversations already happening inside the agency. Then we found it a great way to get a dialogue going outside the agency about more general design topics, too. So, we expanded our scope a bit. The posts are still about digital marketing but are more relevant to readers.

Content is king. What makes a good post? An honest perspective; a fresh point of view (not a recycled observation from the blogosphere); provocative thinking about an issue, trend, or Corporate Training technology; and real news all make good posts. Good posts generate the most links in the blogosphere and drive traffic back to our blog in a wonderful virtuous circle. Readers don't come back if the content is stale, though, so we try to have up to three new posts a day.

Develop a content engine. It's hard for just one writer to produce a lot of high-quality content. You'll need help. A dozen or so people inside our agency post regularly on our blog. Plus, we converts to posts the best conversations from an internal e-mail alias people use to rant and rave about online experiences.

Have an editorial policy. Some Corporate Training blogs allow people to post whatever they want. We have an editorial policy we share with people inside the agency that's quite simple: if you wouldn't be comfortable sitting around a dinner table discussing the content of your blog posting with your mother, your largest client, your best friend, your boss, and your mentor, then you probably shouldn't post it. So far, this has been a great filter.

Experiment, learn, and evolve. We use Type Pad as our basic blogging engine. Now that Web tools are much friendlier to the non-technical, our editor and a few others have cobbled together a dozen or so different tools (search, RSS, analytics, etc.), most of which are free. This saves us from taxing our internal IT organization every time we want to change the blog. The Web itself is a constantly evolving medium, and we try new things all the time. If something isn't working, we pull it off. If we can make a change within a couple of hours, we do it. If it takes longer than that, we implement the idea in phases. Ultimately, a Corporate Training blog is a journey, not a destination, and should evolve as your readership changes and grows.