Social Media B2B

Frequently social media in B2B companies, and especially blogging, is a function of the marketing staff. It is easy for others in the company to defer to marketing because this is often perceived to be the job of marketing. There is so much knowledge and expertise in other areas of the company, below are some ideas to spread the blogging around among others in the organization.

One of the reasons to consider some of these ideas is that marketing professionals do not always make good bloggers. People who are used to communicating in a marketing style of features and benefits can sometimes have trouble finding the right voice for a corporate blog. This voice needs to be established, along with the content strategy and editorial calendar of the blog, and maintained by a single owner, or editor, of the blog. The editor is also the one who is responsible making sure that posts keep flowing. They can either write all the posts themselves, or try to find help.

1. Finding Company Bloggers
Whether you are starting a corporate blog or you have been publishing one for a while, you should always be on the lookout for others within the company to write for it. As you talk to people within the company and they talk about interesting things they are doing or present a unique take on the state of the industry, ask them to write a guest post for the blog. Anyone can do this one time without a big commitment. This shows if they have what it takes to blog. And remember that not everyone does. Look for people with good ideas who can convey them well in writing.

2. Product Managers Share Expertise
Pay close attention to product managers or product engineers. These are people who best understand your customers’ issues and are providing solutions to those problems. If they can write about those issues at a higher level, beyond just “our products solve that,” people from the product team can make some of the best bloggers. These are also some of the most passionate members of your organization, which is a great trait for a blogger to have.

3. Promote Industry Issues
Do you have recognized industry thought leaders in your company? Do you have dynamic people with good ideas, who are well-connected in the industry? These are emerging thought leaders. These may be some of the harder people to convince to blog because of the time involved, but try to get several of these people to commit to one post per month. This is good for both the individuals and the company for them to be publishing regular articles about industry issues.

4. Create Competition Among Bloggers
Once you have a core group of bloggers writing for the company blog, one way to keep them productive and involved is to set up some friendly competition. Set up a leader board that tracks the popularity of posts. The things you can track and compare are number of posts, page views per post, number of retweets, and the biggie, number of comments. In addition to some internal competition complete with trash talking, there are two main things that happen from this leader board. It will force you to stay on top of the metrics of the blog since you have to keep the leaderboard updated, and it will encourage your bloggers to get better. They will learn what kinds of posts get more traffic, what kinds of headlines get retweeted, and what encourages comments. These are things that good bloggers learn by blogging, and by providing extra incentive to your non-marketing bloggers, they will develop these skills too.

5. Find the Next Speilberg Within Each Department
Not everyone is a videographer, but if you rotate the video role around a department you will find some creative people in your company. Since video is another way to tell a story, pick one person from each department and give them a month to shoot some video about something going on in their department, the company or the community. Rotate around people in the department and rotate departments. This will create a regular feature on the blog and really add some depth to the human side of your company. Keep this simple by having them shoot the video and you can edit it for them. It will keep a similar look to all the pieces.

Do you have other suggestions for lightening the blogging burden from the blog editor?

Jeffrey L. Cohen is the Managing Editor of SocialMediaB2B.com. Follow Jeff on Twitter at @jeffreylcohen.