Employees: Bloggers, Brand Ambassadors

Thinking of lauching a corporate blog? You're in good company. It seems every organization imaginable is blogging. Virtually anything goes online, so how do you guarantee your blog is good for your brand?

A new Marketing Sherpa article, “Fortune 500 Blogging: 5 Steps for Major Corporations Launching Blog” offers five steps to ensure your blog is a positive online extension of your brand.

1. Set Goals
What are you trying to achieve? Do you want to make your company more personal, enable employees to speak with customers, promote yourself as an industry expert? Make sure you understand what success looks like and do it for that reason, not because everyone else is doing it.

2. Assemble Stakeholders
In order to have a policy that everyone abides by, you need to allow the players to give their two cents, including legal and HR. Make sure you balance it out with an blog champion - especially a senior executive - and marketing or PR staff.

3. Decide Who Can Blog
Your key is here is to offer the voice to the people who have something to say. Make sure the posts are well written, unique ... and consistently updated.

4. Write a Formal Policy
Drafting policy is no fun any way you slice it, but providing guidelines for employees can be the difference between enabling creative expression or risking a potentially damaging impact to your business.

5. Announce It
It's simple, communicate your policy if you expect people to follow it. Email it, post it to your intranet or kick it off in a visible way to your employees.

Proceeding cautiously and having structure is wise for any organization to protect its brand, but it's absolutely necessary for a large corporation with a public face ... and a lot to lose. However, it's important to keep it light. Drenching a blog in “approved” marketing speak is pointless, no one will read it. And over-policing it to the point that it loses it legitimacy isn’t worth the paper your policy is written on.