Four Ways to Sell Skittish Execs on Corporate Blogging
Blogging isn't for the faint of heart. You have to expect readers to engage on some sort of level if you're doing it right. With that said, some blogs can be the Wild Wild West, which is what gives blogging a bad reputation in the board room and with executives that are stuck in the 80s. So, despite impassioned pleas to get a corporate blog off the ground, sometimes those pleas are destined to fall on deaf ears.
However, no mountain is too high to climb. To reach the corporate summit and gain approval (and maybe even budget), you need to know how to sell the corporate blogging concept to a guy in a tie who thinks the internet is dangerous.
Fortunately, it isn’t as difficult as it may seem.
1. Lay out the approval process
Yes, there will be an approval process. – you need one. Your blog is just another way your company communicates with the market. There must be a process by which posts are reviewed and approved. It shouldn’t be cumbersome, resembling what you have in place for published pieces. Content is content – you’re just parking it in a new place.
2. Commit to recycling
You need to publishing a sizeable amount of content regularly. Instead of spending hours toiling over your laptop in the middle of the night, use what you already have. Carve a white paper up into several blog posts, and run them as a series. Use videos from your corporate site as fodder. By reusing what you already have, you’re showing that you can keep costs under control.
3. Content is platform agnostic
Nobody gets nervous over a ghost-written magazine article – after all, it’s going to appear in print. Mention that you’re ghosting a blog post, though, and the reaction changes. This is foolish: words are words, wherever you decide to put them. When you’re pitching a blog to your company’ bring a copy of a recent newsletter or trade mag article from one of your executives and say: “This is the kind of thing I want to put up on the blog.” It will make the experience a bit easier for the reader to digest.
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