10 Best Practices for Corporate Blogs & Wikis

Noted loyalty expert and author explains the 10 requirements for successful corporate blogs as well as the fast-emerging area of wikis. The most important requirement is to ensure they fit within a corporate content strategy.

(PRWEB) April 11, 2004 --Corporate blogs are hot. Companies are using them to generate buzz, communicate with customers and establish bonds inside and outside of a company. Wikis are an over-the-horizon collaboration tool that allows companies to easily incorporate customer input into product design and marketing.

But because it's such an emerging area, there are no best practices yet. However, Nick Wreden, loyalty expert and author of FusionBranding: How to Forge Your Brand for the Future, has studied corporate blogs and wikis and suggests 10 guidelines that should be part of every company's organizational content strategy.

"Every company should consider blogs as part of their branding strategy," says Wreden, whose book was named as a "best new business book." "But it's easy to make mistakes, especially if blogs are unleashed without a strategy and without awareness of the pitfalls."

Companies using blogs include Lucent, DaimlerChrysler, Hartford Financial Services Group, IBM and ESPN. Based on these corporate experiences, Wreden's 10 rules for using blogs and wikis include:

1. Be authentic: Brands are about trust, and authenticity is the foundation of trust. Blogs should be written as if close friends were sharing observations over a beer. It's easy to tell when PR or legal vampires have sucked the life out of content. One well-known soft drink manufacturer was condemned for using blogs to "astroturf" - create the perception of a grassroots movement where none existed. Such duplicity inevitably backfires on your brand.

2. Be an unmatched resource: Politicians have perfected the art of the "trial balloon." An idea is leaked, and the resultant reaction signals whether it's politically safe to proceed. Use your blog to provide heads-up information unavailable elsewhere, like a forthcoming product or marketing blitz. Any feedback represents invaluable market research.

3. Once you start, don't stop: Blogs are like marriage. Once you start one, you are committed. Otherwise, you risk the wrath of those who link to your blogs or tune in regularly. Corporations that pull their blog or fail to post frequency lose credibility and loyalty.

4. Keep it relevant: What makes Macromedia, Microsoft and other corporate blogs so interesting is that they provide insights about the software and related industry issues such as standards. They don't talk about breakfast menus or the inevitable U.S. deficit disaster. Help ensure relevance with links to other appropriate blogs or Web sites. And be sure to link to your latest press release, article or commercial.

5. Measure your effectiveness: See where you rank on Google, which tends to rank blogs higher than Web sites (in fact, one wit defined a blog as "better location on Google"). Establish an RSS feed and see how many link to you. Keep tabs on your rankings on Daypop, Feedster or Technorati.

6. Monitor other blogs: Most blog entries are just a paragraph or two. You can easily read 200 blogs in an hour. This keeps you in front of the emerging issues in your market, and improves your own blog. Link to other blogs, even if they are critical - but be sure to answer their claims in your own blog.

7. Trust your employees: Employees generate the most-credible blogs, but there is always the risk of unveiling corporate secrets. Encourage your employees to blog, but set reasonable ground rules. Emphasis the importance of discretion. Policies should also address how much corporate time employees can spend blogging.

8. Use blogs for knowledge management (KM): Despite its critics, KM has not been over-promised; vendors have under-delivered. Blogs can address the gap between KM promise and requirements by letting local expertise emerge.

9. Use wikis for employee and customer collaboration: Wikis (based on the Hawaiian word for quick) use open-source principles to transform KM and even the centuries-old relationship between reader and author. Wikis have a link at the bottom of the page that allow anyone to add, change or delete the text. Authoring tools, passwords or permission is not required. (To prevent disasters, older versions of each page are easily restored.) Changes are flagged via RSS alerts. As a result, it represents an ideal medium for collaborative brainstorming. Imagine putting a plan for a new product on a wiki, and have it be modified to precisely reflect the requirements of potential customers!

Think wikis can't work? One favorite resource is the Wikipedia. It has more than 237,000 informative articles on a wide variety of topics, all with numerous links back to source material. All the articles can be changed by anyone at anytime, which means that the great content results from survival of the fittest.

10. Develop an organizational content strategy now: Email, blogs, wikis, Web, voice mail, faxes, newsletters, advertising, PR. No wonder it's so hard for organizations to speak with the consistent voice that is so critical for branding. An organizational content strategy can ensure consistency, vibrancy and value for employees, customers, suppliers and others.    

Nick Wreden, MA, MS, is a customer loyalty expert and the author of FusionBranding: How to Forge Your Brand for the Future, which focuses on customer loyalty and profitability as well as branding accountability. www.fusionbrand.com. Contact Nick at nick@)fusionbrand.com.