PAN Blog

We identified the existing bloggers in the company and brought them into the project. We also asked if anyone else in the company would be interested in having a personal blog if we were to host it for them. Nine people signed up so far! What better way to have the company understand the opportunities and issues related to blogs, and be trusted guides to our customers and prospects than by having employees doing it themselves...

We built a "straw-person" proposal of the corporate blogging rules for employees to review and comment on - a real fun project! We did not make them up from scratch but rather used some of the rules and policies that were developed and documented by other companies (we will link to sources soon). The final rules and corporate policies will be posted as soon as we have them finalized.

After toying for months about the best way to get involved with blogs and other new media, we finally took the plunge. We decided on a three pronged approach to get through our learning curve as quickly as possible and to become trusted advisors to our clients in this field.

1) Get as many employees as possible to experiment with blogs and learn from it. Every team member was given the opportunity to have their own personal blog hosted on prSPEAK.com. Nine people signed up right away and formed a blog team to share best practices and develop things like the employee blogging policy (more on that later). We were also fortunate to have a few long-term bloggers in the company who decided to take an active role in helping others.

2) Surround ourselves with experts. First, we partnered with a consultant, Francois Gossieaux, a friend and former client (two times already) and an early adopter in the online world. Next, we created an advisory board consisting of clients who have deep domain expertise (we are lucky to have a few clients that market products in this space: PubSub, Lycos, Silkroad, KnowNow, etc...) as well as clients who don’t. Having clients who do not yet know how to capitalize on the new media opportunities is especially important to validate the type of guidance and services that they will be expecting from us in this area. We think of them as early beta testers for our upcoming services in that field.

3) Jump in and experiment firsthand as a company. That’s what you’re looking at – our new blog: prSPEAK.com. We hope to learn from doing this and also look forward to using this two-way channel as the agency’s mouth piece to participate in the broader PR conversation which is already well underway.

This whole project is exciting and scary at the same time. We’ve all seen what kind of reception one might get in this space if not properly prepared. I am thankful to my employees, clients and other advisors for their guidance in this exciting journey and I look forward to “prSPEAKING” with you in the near future.

Shel Israel over at Naked Conversations asked last week what kind of companies should or should not blog.

That question bounced around this week during a new business pitch at a company that doesn't currently blog, and hasn't thought of itself as the *kind* of company to blog. It made me think that we're not yet ready to comfortably say duing a new business pitch "Company X shouldn't blog because.." or "Company X should blog because..."

There's so much education that needs to take place before we get to that point that the question to the (potential) client instead might be, "Is there a possibility of reaching your audience through blogs?" The answer to that is arrived at through discovery; asking who exactly is the decision maker the company is trying to reach? Who is the next level below the decision maker that has influence; and who could be considered internal champions? Do they read blogs? Once answered you can move forward and determine whether or not to invest the time necessary to move forward with blog recommendations.

- JR