PR Practitioners: How to Get a Blog Going in any Environment
on May 15, 2011 at 12:45 pmPR Practitioners: How to Get a Blog Going in any Environment
Social Media needs to be core piece of any external outreach plan for PR practitioners and also part of your reputation management strategy. It can significantly help with creating a more favorable landscape for the sales team, increase your Google ranking, manage a crisis situation better, help your executives becomes industry leaders and influence the media on what they write on. We usually hear about successful blogs if CEO or some top exec blogs. But many PR Practitioners run into a roadblock because they can’t find a person who wants to or is willing to blog. In turn, they just have a blog that has a few posts on it or just abandon it completely.
At HP, I took another route when I got resistance from management. I developed a group blog. It’s not the easiest route, but one in which you can very successful. First, you want to get at least 5-7 directors or managers on board to blog. You need to make a business case and there is enough data to easily make one. Second, make a calendar with topic areas and dates you want them to post on and then show them how to use the blogging tool you have. I would calendar out about 2 months and plan blogs about 3 days a week. Create posts that are timely for customers and can help your sales team, such as industry issues, how-to-guides, etc. Third, you will want to make sure you have an analytics tool to see the results. Some companies will have access to something like Radian6, but Google Analytics works very well. I’d also connect with the person in charge of search marketing so you can help improve your Google rankings as well.
Next, it is important to find the important industry blogs and make a list of them. You want to get your blog team to respond to posts on others blogs and put the link to your blog. You can also do this on media articles too. It will help drive traffic and people will include you in their blog rolls. Finally, start to compare traffic and comment increases over 3, 6, 9 and 12 month increments. You will see results and benefits over time!
