Mario Sundar's Speakeasy

Over at Mashable this past week, Erica Swallow compiles 15 interesting corporate blogs – some of which have found mention in our corporate blog rankings over the past 3 years. Guess which ones?

While I’ve shared similar tips in the past, there were a couple of new tips from the post that I wish to highlight.

1. Use the social graph to add “real voices” to your blog:

I think a lot of companies are collaborative group blogs with posts coming from different teams and a diverse array of employees from across the board. For e.g. at LinkedIn, we’ve had posts from nearly 90 of my colleagues (I’m the social media guy at LinkedIn and I edit our corporate blog) from across product, engineering, design, and our executive team. Google is another great example.

The official Google blog pulls insights from all over the company. Taking a quick look at posts from the past few days, I found updates posted by a software engineer, a technical program manager working on Google Apps for government, the vice president of search products and user experience, an entertainment marketing associate, and a university programs specialist — that’s a diverse crowd.

Connecting the people behind the products to the people using the products

What we’ve done on the LinkedIn blog, is to use our LinkedIn API to pull in the most recent LinkedIn profile image and summary for the post author. This gives you a better picture of who’s writing the post and if you’re interested in providing feedback to the author directly you can click through to their profile.

LinkedIn blog pulls in profile info on post authors

Facebook’s blog is very similar as they do the same pulling in the most current profile photo of their post authors. This is something all corporate blogs should be doing since it helps shine the spotlight where it should be shone – on the real voices of the company.

Again, I think this goes back to the basic ideal of social media within corporations – facilitating easier conversations between users and the teams that make the product. Read Hugh Macleod’s classic post on the Porous membrane and how that works within a socially smart organization.

Facebook's blog also pulls in author info frm social graph

2. To promote or NOT to promote a CEO blog:

CEO blogging is a challenging and frankly a debatable idea. But, if you have a CEO who not only likes to blog, but is actually good at it and can find the time for it – then go for it.

Erica even suggests promoting it:

You can’t put up a blog and expect people to just discover it. While that’s possible, it’s very unlikely. Just like any other business, marketing, or educational program you may run, you need to promote it.

There are a lot of ways to promote your blog, but one particular corporate blog is doing a great job with search engine marketing (SEM). Forrester Research’s CEO George Colony runs a blog called The Counterintuitive CEO. While searching for “ceo blog” on Google, you’ll run across his blog in the “sponsored links” section, where paid Google AdWords ads are displayed.

As you can see the first result that pops up when you search for CEO blog is the Top 10 CEO blog rankings that I did nearly 3 years ago.

Is promoting CEO blogs a good use of time & money?

One of blogging’s great advantages is that with a targeted content strategy (picking the right topics to blog about consistently) and a passionate CEO blogging, you don’t need to spend any $s on promoting it otherwise. More on that later.

What do you think? Is it worth spending money to promote your CEOs blog? Or is it spent more usefully in other marketing pursuits? Leave a comment on this blog or follow me on Twitter.

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So, while Erica’s post gives us a sneak peak at some interesting corporate blogs and goes over blogging basics I think at the end of the day – any company’s blog is valued based on two things COMMUNITY and CONTENT that’s useful to your community.

That’s pretty much it. That’s why I’ve been ranking corporate blogs based on their Technorati authority (for lack of a better metric), since it helps us identify how popular and engaging these blogs are with their community. Here are the Top 10 corporate blogs of the past few years.

And, if you’d like to see CEO blogs, check out the original killer post that started it all. Go here.

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