Corporate blogging is on the rise and most startups use their blogs as one of their best PR tools.
But in most corporate blogs, you can see only a few contributors, most of them cofounders, marketing people or even content creators.
[source: JoSek Metal Republik] That means that a great part of the team is not writing, even eventually, to the corporate blog. I think the best approaches to corporate blogging should involve everyone in your startup.
More content
This is one of the most obvious reasons for making everyone writing to the corporate blog, and also the less important one from my perspective, but it’s a good reason after all. If you want to position your startup, you need to generate content, and publishing more content is a way to improve your actual positioning.
More quality and diversity
More content doesn’t need to mean more content regarding the same interests. If your development team startups contributing to your startup blog, they can write about what they care about, so they’ll probably write about different stuff than marketing people. More diversity means more interestingness for your actual readers and you’ll be also expanding the actual reach of your blog.
Educate everyone to understand your clients
Blogging means also documenting and learning about new stuff. It’s an opportunity for everyone at your startup to start trying to understand what concerns to your market. Even if you have awesome developers, that doesn’t mean that your developers and other members of your start team understand the actual need and concerns of your clients. Make them to research and write about topics that could be interesting to your potential customers, educate your team to understand those problems, so when they’re developing new features, they would better understand how to do it well in order to fulfill your customers interests.
Give visibility to everyone working at your startup
Most of the time we forget companies are built around people, but people is the most important asset in your startup. So if your startup team is your primary asset, why are you hiding part of your team from the world? Make them appear in your blog, make them visible to your customers, and create a more human-friendly company.
Generate trust
Eventually, anyone at your company would be talking to a client or potential customer, because there’s a problem when your customer is using your product (that represents mainly your support team), or even because they found each other at any event and they’re talking about what your product could do for his/her company. If you make your team public and visible, it’s more probable that any customer knows the name of some of your team members, so it’s possible that the customer previously knows about the people from your team he is talking with right now. Knowing a person, even if you only know him due to several posts published in a corporate blog, generates trust, because we trust more the people we know. So making everyone at your startup contributing to your blog, would eventually generate trust to your clients base.
Share Knowledge
You’re a startup, so you hire great people and professionals, who accumulates knowledge about what they do everyday. Sharing knowledge is what has made us evolve as society, so sharing your team’s knowledge would help other to solve specific problems they face. Sharing knowledge also generates trust, because if you share interesting problems and solutions, your startup would become a reference on those topics, making your clients feel that they are on good hands.
Test new ideas
Frequently, in a startup, someone from the company has a new idea that would become in a new feature, or even in a side project that would become a new product. When that happens, certain people on your company talks about that idea in order to decide whether that idea can generate something interesting for the company. But it’s not so frequent that you share that idea among your clients, who are the right people to be asked about the potential interest. Sharing those new ideas on your blog, would help you to test the ideas and receive clients feedback that would help you to model a new feature or product.
Get answers to your actual problems
If you share knowledge and make people lifes easier, why wouldn’t you use your blog to receive help about your actual problems? If your developers usually writes about code hacks, or interesting technologies related to your company, you’ll be creating a community of potential helpers to your technical problems. Don’t be afraid to share your problems with others, I’m pretty sure you would find that sharing them is a very good way to find the perfect solution.
Make everyone be nearer sales
This is a real interesting and problematic point for most startups, so I feel I’d write deeper about making everyone at a startup being more near of the sales team of the sales process. Attracting people to your Web site is one of the first steps in order to make sales, so if you make everyone write in your corporate blog, you’d be starting to walk into the right direction.
Fun
At the end, blogging is fun, so make it possible for your startup team to start making fun contributing to your corporate blog.