Corporate Bloggers: Know the Challenges You’ll Face

Corporate blogging isn’t easy. The rewards are high, and this type of platform will reduce your workload over time (if you’re an in-house writer), though you’ll probably invest all that saved time in producing more content – especially if you’re addicted to returns. Some of the challenges aren’t immediately evident, and you’ll only encounter them when you’re knee-deep in the shit.

For mainstream bloggers, especially, you will run into some unexpected challenges. If you’re used to reblogging news stories or use press releases as a crutch when you’re short content, you’ll have to change your game.

Retailers amping up social media marketing for Black Friday

Retailers are looking to get a taste of social media love. With Black Friday around the corner, companies in the retail sector are planning major campaigns through social networking sites like Facebook to access wider markets and drive more sales. Some, such as Sears, JCPenney, Starbucks and Target, among others, are actually letting customers shop via Facebook itself, rather than use only it as a tool for routing traffic. The retailers know they need a new angle for winning more business, and social media appears to be the answer.

I wanted to pull the video from an MSNBC story into this post, but WordPress and MSNBC don’t seem to be willing to show me any combined love. So, click here to check it out. And, click here to read my BloggingStocks article on social media and retailers.

Five Survival Tips for Corporate Bloggers

Getting a corporate blog off the ground isn’t easy. Sure, the technology isn’t hard to master: any 12-year-old kid can get a blog up and running. The challenges you’ll find in launching and managing a corporate blog are in filling the damned thing. We’ve all heard that “content is king,” but delivering on that can be incredibly difficult. A day or two into your new blogging endeavor, you’ll realize just how hard it is to feed the beast as much as it needs. Don’t get discouraged. Take a deep breath, and look at the five tips below.

Corporate Bloggers: Memory Is Your Biggest Asset

Corporate bloggers use commodity technology to communicate their companies’ messages. The advantage seems to come from the content itself, because that’s where individual expertise, institutional knowledge and products and tools can be brought to bear. So, this is where corporate bloggers find their attention focused. After all, what else is there?

Well, plenty.

Though I hate the expression “best practices,” the corporate blogging space is suffering from an acute shortage of them. From pushing out content via Twitter to tagging and linking, there is no widely accepted standard for getting the most out of a corporate blog using kickass blogging techniques. Well, I’m going to try to change that … and I’d love to get some ideas from other bloggers. I’ll get the process started with my top recommendation: sharpen your memory.

Social Media: Choose Your Platform Wisely

Businesses looking to promote themselves in the social media world are either eager to find new opportunities or have faced the reality that they’ll soon have no choice but to venture into this space. As with any endeavor, though, trying to do everything will ultimately yield nothing. You need to understand the alternatives available and select those that are most manageable given the resources you have and will deliver the biggest bang for your buck.

While most of these tools – such as Twitter, Facebook and Digg – have many similar features, there are subtle differences among them, which will factor into the execution of your social media plan. Sometimes, you don’t really know what you’re getting into until you’re knee-deep and watching the water rise. Just by having a sense of what’s out there, you can focus your efforts on the tools that are most likely to address your specific needs.