How To Write A Great Corporate Blog

Earlier this week I wrote a little critique of ad agency Hill Holiday's lame blogging attempt. When I saw Floyd Hayes this morning he told me that I must have been in a right foul mood when I wrote it: "It was like the blogging equivalent of slamming someone's face in the wall," he pitched in his jangly Geordie accent. We talked more and we mentioned the great W+K London's blog and how they managed to run a great blog and it all came down to a single principle. It's pretty simple:

Great brand - great blog. Shallow brand - shallow blog.

You can only write a great blog if your staff live and breathe your brand. You can't write a corporate blog if your staff don't connect or don't know what your brand stands for. NEVER.

Which camp does your company sit? If you don't trust what your staff might write and want to impose a work-flow system to your blog writing - then you're in the 'shallow brand' camp.

So the first step to writing a great corporate blog would be to understand if your brand permeates your company. And the concept of permeation is not the same as having all your staff recite the company values: I doubt the folk who write the W+K blog would all describe W+K's brand the same - but they know how it 'feels'. A brand who can write about their own failures and disappointment shows just how strong the brand is.

Ok, ok. You don't have to be warts and all - Fallon's planning team does a very good job at being far more educational on their blog.

Meanwhile, not knowing the BBDO nor Hill Holiday outside their blogs (and the research I did when I last went job hunting); I would argue that the team at these agencies do not truly understand nor live and breathe their brands. That's why their blogs, frankly, suck.

Of course, the principle extends beyond ad agencies: The Multilever site suggests that Southwest Airlines has a great blog too:

Southwest is not worried about what people are saying because they are proud of how they run their business.

The folk at Southwest lives and breathe the brand. If you've flown the airline, you'll know it.

Thanks to http://if.psfk.com/when/archives/opinion_how_to_write_a_great_corporate_blog.html for this how-to.