I’ve been posting rather erratically for the past few weeks, but I thought I should provide a quick update on the panel I was a part of, earlier today at South by Southwest (Interactive). The panel discussed the “Future of Corporate Blogging”, where I was joined by Lionel Menchaca, chief blogger at Dell and an inspiration (check out what he’s done at Dell) as well as Kami Huysa from New PR Pro. The panel was moderated by Mack Collier of Viral Garden who’s been an old blogging buddy of mine.

Thanks to Jeremiah for the above pic

Here are 5 thoughts we discussed on the panel:

1. Social Media Strategy

Speaking of the necessity of a social media strategy, I’d say go back to the drawing board and figure out where exactly are your users. At LinkedIn, most of our users are online – they were on Yahoo! Groups, LinkedIn Answers and mostly online forums. So creating a corporate blog made all the sense for us.

2. Need for a Feed | Goals for a corporate blog

Once you’ve established that your target audience is online, you’ve gotta figure out the need for a corporate blog. What exactly are you trying to achieve with a corporate blog. Write down your goals. Ours were: user education, enhance user engagement, customer support and breaking news about LinkedIn! What are yours?

3. Future of the LinkedIn blog:

Keeping in mind our goals, we’re aggressively providing users all the juiciest video demos as and when we rollout new features. And, I’m on Twitter so any user can follow me and ping me when they’ve a problem. In addition, the future will see quicker blog posts, and quicker response times from my end.

4. Corporate Blogging ROI:

Absolutely! My best suggestion would be to check out this blog post I wrote recently on the Mprofs blog | ROI of Corporate blogging. Or, check out the Forrester report itself (by Charlene Li). But, in case you were wondering, you can calculate the ROI on a corporate blog.

5. Things to consider before you start a corporate blog

If you’re interested in starting a corporate blog. Ask yourself two questions

a. Where are my users?

b. What goals can I expect to solve with a blog

c. What is the ROI I’m expecting

d. Does a social media strategy support the goals I’ve set for myself.

And, just do it!

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If you’d like to see how the SXSW panel on “Future of Corporate Blogging” was received, here’s some feedback from a few of those who participated in the session and guess what they had to say about it. Thanks to all for the kind words.

1. Future of Corporate Blogging is about Communication, not tools by fellow panelist, Kami Huyse

2. Corporate Blogging – How the Pros do it? by Scott Monty

3. Corporate Blogging by Ben Lavender

4. Future of Corporate Blogging w/ audience questions by Vanessa Tan

5. Panel Review by Wendy Sight Sarah Goodwin (thanks to Linda Sherman for pointing it out)

6. Heidi on the SDN blog reviews it

And, of course Lionel and I blogged about it on our corporate blogs here and here. Mack’s SXSW review can be found here.