Once an organization has decided it's ready to engage with its customers, clients or stakeholders through a corporate blog, the most fundamental decision is deciding upon the blog's focus.
I'm a journalist with 23 years' experience, so for me generating captivating content for a defined audience comes as naturally as breathing.
But many business bloggers have little or no prior experience of creating ongoing targeted content for an specified audience, and attempting to find a start point can become overwhelming.
Great corporate blog content: 1.
Apply this business blog formula But it needn't be, because there is a simple formula for determining what a business should be writing about in its corporate blog.
Take a piece of paper and draw two overlapping circles.
In the left circle write 'What we know' and in the right circle write 'What they want'.
The overlapping area in the middle is what you need to be blogging about as a business.
So, for a law firm specialising in insurance, 'What we know' is insurance law, and 'What they want' is insurance law expertise.
For a customer-facing high street cosmetics chain, the 'know' circle would read 'cosmetics expertise', and the 'want' circle would be 'cosmetics information and advice'.
The next challenge is working out the nature of the content in the overlap between what you do as a business and what your customers want.
To a large extent, this will be determined by the nature of your business.
Great corporate blog content: 2.
Products-based businesses For products-based businesses the focus will invariably be helping and informing customers and potential customers.
An example of this is the official Microsoft blog for its SharePoint family of business software products ( http://blogs.
msdn.
com/sharepoint ).
Great corporate blog content: 3.
Expertise-based businesses For businesses that provide expertise of any description -- whether it's construction, accounting or design - the blog will have a marketing bent, and be designed to build traffic and brand visibility.
A nice example of this is the ad agency Ogilvy's blog ( http://redirect.
ogilvy.
com ) promoting its direct advertising expertise.
Great corporate blog content: 4.
Service-based organizations And then there are organisations that provide a service, such as local authorities and charities.
Such blogs will by necessity have a strong PR element, because a key aim will be to enhance and drive public perception.
A classic example of this is Health Direct, the official blog of NHS Direct, the illness assessment helpline service run by the National Health Service.