Business value of Social Media part 2: blogging
reprinted with permission from the HP Small Business Center

No doubt, you’ve heard the term web log, better known as blog, but you may not know how blogging can actually benefit your business. By definition, a blog is a website that hosts entries—or posts—of commentary, descriptions of events, graphics, videos and more. No longer just a way for controversial thoughts to be heard, small and large businesses everywhere have begun to blog to build brand awareness, interact with their customers on a more personal level, and elevate their status in the industry as a thought-leader

In part one of this article, The Business value of Social Media Part I: Online networking, we explored how free networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are crucial to helping your business thrive. Here, we’ll show you how blogging has gone from being an online diary of sorts, to an online marketing tool that helps you gain credibility and position yourself and your business as leaders in your industry. We’ll also provide a few tips for getting started, should you decide what millions of others already have—that blogging is good for business. 

To blog or not to blog?
In order to answer this question, you must ask yourself if you or someone in your organization can commit a few hours per week to posting quality content, interacting with your readers and keeping up with industry news by reading other blogs and news sites. If you answered yes, and you’re looking to build your brand awareness, grow your business, sell your products and services, or influence the market, you should be blogging. 

For years, with the onset of sites like, LiveJournal, and Myspace, blogging became popular with technologically-savvy teens, extroverts and those generally comfortable with talking to an unknown audience in an unedited, first-person correspondence. Within the last five years however, the "blogosphere” (the blogging community) has ballooned to include business blogging, which can be used both internally to enhance the communication and culture in a corporation, and externally for marketing, branding or public relations purposes.

Companies like Whole Foods, use their blog to post recipes that integrate the products they sell and to create awareness for their green initiatives. HP has multiple blogs that showcase our employee’s talents, and carry across our vast array of product lines to keep users up to date on innovations, events, promotions, and more.

No matter the purpose of your blog, you can interact with your customers on a more personal level, get their feedback, and also gather contact data in a non-threatening way. Most free blogging sites, like WordPress and Blogger allow you to set up a registration page, so that anyone who comments on your blog must leave a contact email that will not be shared with anyone but the blog manager.

Getting started
Managing a blog can be somewhat tricky, but not if you start off on the right foot. Where should your blog be hosted? What do you post about? And how do you manage negative comments? These things and more can be controlled with the right resources.

Where should your blog live? When choosing where to host your blog, consider whether the site offers traffic tools, such as trackers that identify recent posts and dominant message threads. Wordpress offers easy ways to add blog tracking tools. Learn more here. 

Consider linking your blog to your company’s website. Blogger, Wordpress and Windows Live Spaces let you create your own design or use preformatted templates that help guide you through the setup process. If you’re not a design whiz, you can still communicate to your audience in a way that looks and feels professional. 

Who are you talking to? Before you start posting, you need to identify your audience and decide what you will talk about based on their interests. If you don’t know your audience, you won’t reach your intended readers and thus your content can be lost or buried.

What should you write about? Deciding what to write about can be the hardest part of blogging. Original content is ideal, but not every single post you write has to be your original content. It does, however, have to be thought provoking and relevant. As stated in part 1 of this article, relevant info is KEY! 

Read industry blogs and comment on their content. Write about what others in your industry are doing, whether you agree or disagree with it, and most importantly, why? Just make sure you link back to the site you’re commenting on-it’s common blogging courtesy! By doing so, not only will you keep readers engaged, but you’ll help others do what you’re trying to do, which is drum up traffic by spreading the written word.

If you’re completely stumped on what to write about, sites like Plinky offer prompts to break the blogging block. 

Get noticed: With 184 million blogs worldwide, 26.4 of which are in the U.S.,[1] it might seem like your blog will never be found. Don’t be intimidated. You can improve searchability by tagging your blog with keywords and using them in your headlines and frequently throughout your post. Tagging your posts also helps your blog stay organized if people are searching within. Additionally, you can use your Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin accounts to generate traffic to your blog. (Part 1 of this article shows you how to set up these accounts.)

To keep people coming back, you need to build traffic between blogs. You can do this by "blogrolling." This is just adding a set of links on your blog site that identifies other sites, related to your business, industry or expertise, that you find value in and feel others will too. If you’re posting fresh content often, blogrolling encourages a steady back and forth between various sites, including other blogs.

Keep up: You can subscribe to most blogs or sites through an RSS feed. Subscribing means you can compile all of your favorite blogs and sites into one space called an aggregator or RSS reader. The most newly updated sites show up at the top of your reader, helping you more easily sift through what’s new and  relevant, and in turn, whose posts you should be responding to. Popular RSS readers are Googlereader, NewsGator and others. Read about the top 10 RSS readers and choose which one is right for you.    

Honesty is policy: There are ways to lose credibility in the blogosphere. Here are a few things to be wary of when you’re new to blogging. 

1. Don’t hide your motives:  If you’re blogging for your business, just say so. You’ll gain more respect and credibility the more honest you are with your readers.
2. Proofread like it’s your job: Most bloggers don’t have an editorial staff in place to ensure accurate information that is easy to digest. Likewise, readers may not take your content seriously if your posts are riddled with typos. A simple spell check, or having someone else quickly read through your content before posting can solve these problems.
3. The curse of the 404 error: When linking back to other content, make sure that the pages you reference are in working order. Leading someone to a dead page will only keep them from returning to your blog.

Negative Nellies: Negative comments can be both good and bad for your business. On one hand, they can get the conversation going between your readers. But if you’re finding that some people just aren’t posting constructive criticism, you can manage the comments on your blog by setting it up in such a way that comments must be approved by the moderator before being posted. Finally, be cautious of censoring too much for fear of looking like your company can’t take criticism or you have something to hide.

Onward and upward
Once you’ve set up your blog, you can learn how to integrate it with other social media by taking some of HP’s free social networking classes. Following these blogging basics can help you position yourself as a thought-leader in your industry and also help you gain credibility. Post as often as possible, but post quality content and you should be able to boost readership and ultimately interact more personally with your clients and others in your industry. Meanwhile, you’ll be helping those with similar interests interact with each other. It’s a win-win situation.