Change the Story, Change the World: The Art of Corporate Blogging

I’m excited that I’m going to hear Liz Cohen discuss corporate blogging at Word Camp Jerusalem this Sunday. Liz runs Answers.com’s blog, no.stupid.answers.

A corporate blog lets you connect people with your vision of your company. Through no.stupid.answers Liz and her colleagues connect with the Answers.com community around a vision of building the world’s greatest collection of questions and answers.

The blog includes posts about:

• Community members, such as Kharrima is Still A-w-e-s-o-m-e!, Crystal McCann’s recent profile of Kharrima
• New Content, such as Pnina Baumgarten’s Time to learn Hinglish. And Rhyming Slang. And… about our new sources for Neologisms, Nutrition, biographies of contemporary musicians (from Abbato ZZ Top), Hinglish, and Rhyming Slang.
• Feature of the week, such as Video answers and new mobile community features
• Poetry Cafe, where Matthew Crowder coordinates poetry from our community, such as WorldWide520’s touching Why we wiki

The most important benefit from all this is to gather the community around a shared vision, working together to provide great answers. no.stupid.answers provides a face and a voice to the Answers.com mission.

Other corporate blogs that I love:

• Outspoken Media. I just really enjoy Lisa Barone’s writing. The primary purpose of her blog seems to be to get people to want to hire Outspoken Media when they’re looking to increase recognition of their brand. This is the normal model for a consulting agency writing a blog. If I were looking for branding help, they’d probably be the first company I’d turn to, solely because their blog connected me to their company and convinced me of their excellence. My favorite post from that blog: The 7 blog posts you shouldn’t publish.
• The search marketing industry has some excellent blogs including SEOmoz and SEO Book. In each case they’re always on-topic with great info, and they upsell to pro memberships for their tools. SEO Book has an excellent post today, How to Write Good. My favorite SEOmoz post was Jennifer Lopez’s SEO & The Princess Bride. But warning: the Princess Bride post got an unusually high number of down votes on SEOmoz. Part of many corporate blogs’ success is always staying on target and providing actionable information to their users. You may sometimes have trade-offs, in this case an entertaining but non-actionable post that helps some readers connect with you and your brand, but pisses others off.
• Rena Reich and Omer’s Scratching Post. My wife’s blogs connecting people to The Pet Wiki. The former is filled with actionable posts about setting up a Wiki. The latter is told from a cat’s perspective. Both help connect people with The Pet Wiki’s story, pet lovers sharing useful information. The former has the added advantage that if Rena ever starts accepting clients for MediaWiki consulting, the blog would help with that story as well. My favorites from each blog: Facebook Connect for MediaWiki and chilling with my babe.

Note that my blog is terrible as a corporate blog. It’s posts are never off-topic only because there is no established topic. It’s all the thoughts that I need to articulate and that I hope others find helpful. I hope it connects you to my story, and to Answers.com’s. My story? I’m fortunate to be helping great people do a great job.

What are your favorite corporate blogs? Why do you blog (or not blog)? I’d love to connect to your story too.