My good friend, Mack, writes a great piece in MarketingProfs’ blog on the 10 elements every corporate blog should satisfy. Here’s my take on five of them, culled from my experience managing LinkedIn’s corporate blog.

#1. Actionable goals

Absolutely! Before you start your corporate blog, you want to ask yourself what the top 3 goals for your blog are and what the metrics for measuring its success are. I’ve said this earlier on our SXSW panel with Mack that you want to start off by defining your goals right from the outset and measure its effectiveness at every stage.

#2. A dedicated blog editor

IMO, a key goal of a corporate blog is to get the creators of a product or service face to face with its users, having a genuine conversation. In LinkedIn’s case that has meant conversations initiated by over 50 of my colleagues within the organization. And, I’m the sole blog editor who coordinates and makes these conversations/blog posts happen in addition to my other responsibilities. So, I think even having one employee  manage the schedule of your blog posts would work – no matter how large the organization.

#3. Schedule

Absolutely. The biggest challenge in any corporate blog is continual content creation. At LinkedIn, we’ve currently ramped up to almost 6 posts a week – from around 3 a week when we started. Have a schedule and stick to it. This again, would fall under the responsibility of the blog editor.

#4. Comment Policy

Most corporate blogs have one and it’s pretty much standard fare. I’d recommend that all corporate blogs moderate comments because you don’t want spam or profanity on your blog. Here’s the comment policy on the LinkedIn blog.

We love to hear from you. So feel free to comment, but keep in mind the basics of blog etiquette — no spam, no profanity, no slander, etc. All comments are moderated.

#5. The human element – social media

Associating a face to a post is IMO an important element of corporate blogs. We link each post to it’s authors’ LinkedIn profile with the profile picture from their public LinkedIn profile, which provides context to the blog posts.

Also, try to include as much social media as possible – pictures on Flickr and videos on YouTube are pretty easy to have. We currently have nearly 70 videos on YouTube detailing every major product release and many of these videos can also be found on the LinkedIn Learning Center.

Check out the other 5 elements in Mack’s post here. And, if you’ve a question on starting or managing a corporate blog, leave a comment.