The Birth of a Blog
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When building an online community, there are some underlying principles that hold true whether a company is large or small, and among those is a genuine commitment to openness and fostering a dialogue. When starting a blog, companies need to be prepared to embrace those principles; they must also be flexible and open enough to apply them and willing to commit resources to promote them.
Intel digital strategist Bryan Rhoads recounts the founding of Intel's blog, Technology@Intel, and points to three critical success factors for developing an online community:
- Early management buy-in. Though blogging started as a grassroots initiative among employees in 2003, CEO Paul Otellini recognized the benefits of blogging and launched his own employee blog the next year. Other Intel executives soon followed, culminating in a fully IT-supported platform by 2005.
- Willingness to share information. Team-based wiki collaboration led to the enterprise-wide “Intelpedia,” which today contains over 15,000 articles from employees defining, collaborating in and documenting the vast Intel workplace.
- Investing resources. In 2008, Intel launched a global training initiative (Digital IQ) that invited employees to participate in social media. Within weeks employees began directly sharing their experiences and knowledge on places like Twitter, Facebook, technology websites, BBSs in China and other worldwide support forums.
"We created all of these social spaces to foster dialogue and make important contributions to a widening range of issues relevant to our customers, to our employees, and to the future of technology," says Rhoads.
Fast-forward to 2010, and Intel now offers corporate blogs in over 25 languages on topics ranging from corporate responsibility and research to jobs and customer support.
The Po!nt: Building a successful online community is a process, not the flip of a switch, one that requires a strong vision and active commitment from all participants.
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This is a good post presenting three critical elements of success in forming online communities. The only two elements we would add, when advising clients on how to do just this, are:
1) As you said it's a Process, not the flip of a switch. So run it using the Continuous Process Improvement mantra: Think, Plan, Do, Measure and Repeat. Do this and you WILL get better and better over time, regardless of what you goals are (and you'll define those as part of the Think step). This link is to a post called, "How to Run a Social Media Marketing Campaign"
which describes this Process in more detail: http://bit.ly/cEc0ln The post is at the bottom of this index page.
2) The whole exercise of online marketing - all those SEO, Social Media Marketing and Pay-per-Click campaigns, - should be focused on converting people. To do this the content in your blogs and on your site as a whole should be designed to suit your future client's "buying cycle". What used to be called your "sales-cycle", but which I've changed to more clearly reflect who is in charge of the process today.
Designing content to match this cycle means having introductory content items to begin with which are aimed at educating your new visitors to your site, developing "Awareness" of your company and its products and services. And then, once the prospect has read or watched these items, to give him or her material more focused to your own solution, to create "Interest" and then having content aimed at converting the prospect by giving them more detailed material, now looking at your advantages as opposed to your competitors, to cultivate "Preference".
We regard this whole process as part of what you need to do, to turn your website into an Inbound Prospect Magnet which attracts, engages, qualifies, nurtures and cultivates prospects, and then feeds them into your Customer Relationship Management solution so that your reps can turn them into clients.
Good post, one important aspect missing from the analysis of success factors for a company blog (IMO) is this...you need to be able to take negative comments on your company/products right at your home turf..i.e in a website you have spent money building.
That is not something many executives are able to digest (yet). Of course. the fact remains that if you don't provide the forum, those comments will show up somewhere else where you might not even have the means of offering an effective response.
12 months ago I pitched blogging and social media to Oshyn, Inc. It was a well taken idea but it took awhile to get people on board. Everyone was of course busy working on billable projects and their priority was Oshyn's clients. I think something companies looking into blogging should be aware of is that they need to be aware that (particularly with the state of the economy) employees may be reticent to spend the time writing blog posts. The change at oshyn.com has been great - but now I must work on lead conversion!
Businesses are realising the power of online communities and the benefits they can offer. Consequently, we are seeing more brands launching communities and I doubt this trend is going to change any time soon.
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