Health Check: How Trusted Is Your Corporate Blog?

Today, I’m going to play doctor, in fact, I’m a specialist: A corporate blog doctor. Most corporate blogs aren’t trusted, and here’s a very simple heuristic health check to gauge whether your corporate blog is going to be trusted by your readers.

This is a quick and dirty scorecard, if I was going one for a real Forrester report, it would be far more conclusive, weighted , detailed, quantitative, and scientific, but today, this is just a quick example, to illustrate a point we already know, let’s get to it, please, turn your head and cough:

Health Check: How Trusted Is Your Corporate Blog?

1. Writing style:
How you write indicates how real you can truly be

Great: Blog is written in a human voice
Bad: Content looks vetted by corp comm
Horrible: Rehashed press release

2. Topics:
What does the blog talk about? does it matter to marketing –or customers?

Great: Discusses the lifestyle (or workstyle) of actual customers
Good: Discusses the wider industry topics
Horrible: The corporate blog exclusively talks about the company

3. Humility:
Perhaps one of the most important attributes, how human and real is this blog, or is it giving lip service?

Great: Admits when wrong and discusses in open the short comings of the company and product and demonstrates in public how it will be improved
Good: Admits shortcomings but combats and defends the criticism, also known as spin
Bad: Only discusses the company in the best possible light, and may link, but not take on critics
Horrible: Never discuss the short comings of the company on the blog

4. Linking Behavior:
Links are the currency of the blogosphere, it indicates you respect someone else’s opinion so much that you’re willing to send them away from you.

Great: Links out to other sources, even competitors or critics as well as the next listed
Good: Links out to other sources, where other discussions are occurring
Bad: Primarily links to corporate created content 25% of the time
Horrible: Primarily links to corporate created content over 50% of the time

5. Customer Inclusion:
Do corporate blogs allow their customers to partake? or are they only second class citizens

Good: Allows for customers to guest blog, or includes snippets of their experiences
Bad: Content is only published by employees

6. Dialog:
Allowing for feedback can instill more trust

Great: Comments enabled and published instantly
Good: Comments enabled but reviewed causing time delay
Bad: Trackbacks only
Horrible: No comments allowed

7. Comment Moderation:
Blogs that allow for disagreeing comments are more real –and interesting.

Great: Comments (other than spam or off topic) are allowed, including direct disagreements
Bad: Negative comments are censored or altered
Horrible: No negative comments allowed

8. Frequency:
While more isn’t always better, having a steady rhythm of content is important

Good: A steady publication rate of posts appropriate to the speed of that market
Bad: Posts appear at a random rate, often starting off with apologies for not posting
Horrible: Posts appear to either promote the company during an announcement –or to combat a competitor

What’s missing? leave a comment
What other categories do you think should be criteria? Leave a comment and I’ll add it in, and credit you.

Update: Joe Wilcox from Microsoft Watch suggests that ‘story telling‘ be an attribute to consider. He makes a good point, but I could add that under the content, or writing style. Not all blogs need to tell stories, some are blogs for product updates, or even support, but I get his point, thanks Joe.

The Doctor’s Diagnosis:

Strong specimen, keep at it: If you’re tallying up your corporate blog (you should ask your readers to help, so you’re a bit more unbiased) and you find that your blog is receiving many good or great scores, in fact over 75%+ of them, you’re on the way to be one of the 16% of trusted bloggers.

On the way, but go back to the gym: If you’re getting borderline at 50-75% , with only about half the criteria being good or great, you’ve got some improvements to make.

Minor Illness –but needs treatment: If you’re getting 25%-50% of the scores in good or great, you really need to evaluate your efforts and think if your corporate cultures is right for this, or if you even have the right bloggers on staff.

Terminally Ill: Lastly, if less than 25% of your criteria is good or great, you really need to consider shutting it down –you’re not getting it and your culture, strategy, or team should focus elsewhere. Giving you the advice to take two in the morning ain’t going to cut it, it’s time for euthanasia.

If this were a report, I would construct a scoring mechanism to help provide a sense of direction for this heuristic evaluation, or even more accurate, I would poll the actual readers of the blog to find out their opinions, but for the most part, the writing is literally on the wall.

Physician heal thyself: I guess I should also ask, how trusted do you think my web strategy blog is?

240 Replies to “Health Check: How Trusted Is Your Corporate Blog?”

  1. Jeremiah,

    Thanks for another great post (as usual). I recently moved into the marketing department at Mzinga and one of the things I’ve been commissioned with doing in the new year is establishing a healthy blogging program.

    A lot of our senior leaders blog and while we have some really good practices under our belt (open commenting, human voice, etc), there’s still a long way to go.

    When it comes to social media jobs, I anticipate the need for future “Editor in Chief 2.0” type roles in the near future. With only 16% of corporate blogs trusted, the best prescription a company can be offered is an actual person to help manage a company’s UGC (user-generated content).

    I think a lot of corporate bloggers can read this post and see value, but it’s helpful to have an internal resource to make sure they follow through.

    Alexa

  2. Personally, I find all the comments at the end of an article really annoying, especially if I am trying to print out for later reference.

    I would prefer it if the original writing was available for print without all the comments.

  3. Corporate blogs must become a trusted resource for consumers.

    Respond “ Reflect on how the company took action or changed its behavior based on the feedback received from consumers (see # 5 Customer Inclusions or # 6 Dialogues). Consumers must feel as if their ideas are of value and the company must share good examples of how they are paying attention to the ever-changing world consumers live in.

  4. a prominent link to the blog is crucial. otherwise no one will find out about your blog. also, my question is that should the blog have its own subdomain? like journal.xxxxx.com or blog.xxxx.com or just regular link will be suffice? xxx.com/blog???

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  5. For a corporate blog to be a success and still have cheap hosting they need to make it run real fast , and write the content at a real personal level so the visitors can relate and connect to the articles

  6. Very good post about Health check, I especially liked the part about Humility! Keep up the great work!

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  11. Jeremiah, think you have got that spot on. Couldnt agree more. Especally with all these autoblogging sites springing up

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  17. well everything is fine with your post like very good topic,a better command on the same also,very nice point. but still it need some amendments like in last two points.i am not agree with them.
    Thanks

  19. well everything is fine with your post like very good topic,a better command on the same also,very nice point. but still it need some amendments like in last two points.i am not agree with them.
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  30. These are all great points and I think writing like you talk in a warm human way that people can relate to is extremely important. I also know from experience that using pictures and videos especially ones that are personalized will indeed an alot of stickiness to your blog posts. Additionally, building a large online social community with facebook pages and twitter that you really interact with can build alot of traffic that you would otherwise simply be relying on the search engines to deliver. Excellent post for all of us.

  32. Jeremiah,

    Timeless check up advice for any blog really, not just a corporate blog, nearly all applies. Trust only goes as far as it’s earned.

  33. I very like you share things,thank you to take the time share.Also hope that the next time can still see your share

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