Starting your company blog. Here are a few guidelines to start it, and keep it going- Remember if you don't blog you lose ground to your competitors!


Train Your Bloggers
Who's on your communications team? It used to be a small group, but now everyone who blogs at the company is spreading the message. And it's important that these people be trained.

If a company blogger spills financial information, it can get you in hot water with regulators. Other leaks could help competitors or lead to embarrassing revelations about top executives or the workplace. No wonder many companies are worried about blogging.

The natural instinct is to restrict employee blogging. But that can be shortsighted. Every employee who blogs can be making contacts with potential customers and enhancing the company brand.

If bloggers become part of a company's communications effort, what does the old PR department do? Increasingly, it'll train and coordinate the bloggers.

Be Careful with Fake Blogs
Companies are eager to establish one-to-one links with customers, but they're often reluctant to plunge blindly into the blogosphere. So they set up fake blogs. These are blogs that are created by corporate marketing departments to promote a service, product, or brand using a fake character or name.

These pseudo-blogs are risky because many of the most passionate bloggers view them as an affront to their community, and each one stands out like a billboard in Yosemite. When the blogosphere gets hold of a fake, it can turn it into a public roasting of the company.

So should companies avoid fake blogs altogether? That's hard to say, because sometimes the buzz is welcome, even if it's negative.

The upshot: Your choice on fakes, but the risks are high.

Track Blogs
This is the easiest and most important step. First, poke around online and find the most influential bloggers following your company. Read them every day. Then do automated tracking of discussions.


Why is it important to do different kinds of tracking? Postings even from small-time bloggers can get picked up by a search engine, amplified by a top blogger, and eventually break into the mainstream.

PR Truly Means Public Relations
Blogs knock down the barriers between a company and its customers. Businesses need to take that into account and adapt.


Netflix figured this lesson out after a rocky start. A fan named Mike Kaltschnee started a blog called Hacking Netflix that was full of news about online movie-rental company's services. Kaltschnee asked for a closer relationship with Netflix, including access to executives and briefings on news releases. Netflix didn't pay attention to him -- until he wrote about his frustrations on his blog last June. The posting was picked up and spread quickly through the blogosphere. Talk about bad PR.

At about the same time, Netflix hired Michele Turner as vice-president for product marketing. She promptly reached a working arrangement with Kaltschnee, whose blog attracts 100,000 visitors a month. The two speak regularly, and Kaltschnee provides Netflix with insights that he's hearing from readers.

Kaltschnee's suggestions have helped lead to a new service called Profiles. Launched in January, Profiles allows customers to create up to five separate lists of requested films per subscription. So, a family with a subscription could have separate lists for the children and the parents.

Be Transparent
No hard and fast rules for navigating the worlds of blogging and marketing exist. Still, a few principles are emerging, including the importance of full disclosure. Being open about the kind of marketing you're doing is critical.

Ask Stephen King, the president and CEO of Marqui, a Web-services marketing company. Late last year, King and consultant Marc Canter cooked up the notion of paying bloggers to market King's company. The key to the venture's success was being completely open about it.


Here's how Marqui ensures openness. Everything about Marqui's blog program is up on its site, including the contract, a list of the bloggers working for Marqui, and background material Marqui sends to bloggers. The bloggers have total control over what they write. They can criticize the software or write at length about it. The only requirement was they have to mention Marqui once a week.

Yet Marqui benefited from the buzz about the novelty of what it was attempting. The number of people who visited Marqui's site rose from 2,000 in November to 150,000 in December. And the company decided to continue the program after the first three-month period ended.

Rethink Your Corporate Secrets
Consider one secret you have under lock and key at your company. Maybe it's a list of projects for next year or details of the unbelievable bill from the latest software licenesing fee. There are all kinds of things you're trained not to leak to competitors.

But what's the value of a locked up secret? In the world of blogs, you may find more value in sharing what you used to think of as secrets. Blogs are certain to make you rethink what should be locked away, because companies are increasingly sharing such information to win new partners and harvest fresh ideas. This doesn't mean they don't keep secrets or that you shouldn't -- only that you should reevaluate whether you can get more out of sharing information or keeping a lock on it.

Traditionally, branding is associated with physical products and consumer packaged goods. But branding has become a crucial part of business for the service industry, which today employs more people than all other industries combined. And mergers and acquisitions in combination with global deregulation has seen the rise of many powerful global brands in the service industry. Financial services has been in the forefront of this development and four of the 30 most valuable brands (according to Interbrand) in the world are financial services brands (Citibank, American Express, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch).

Branding is increasingly important for professional services companies for several reasons. You cannot store a service, it is consumed at the same time as it is produced. If you are going to buy a new computer you can go to the store and look at it, feel it and try it out before you buy. You can