When we started our HRmarketer.com blog a little over a year ago, our intention was to become an open and honest portal of marketing and PR information for companies that sell to human resource professionals. We wanted to provide HR service providers with great marketing and PR resources, tips, and links. We wanted to share our opinions on the human capital marketplace, even to the point of being a bit brave with thought-provoking posts (which we’ve been doing of late).
And we wanted to bring awareness to our marketing and PR services (of course).
Blogs can be a powerful marketing tool for your company if you have the right balance of all of the above. Our blog has helped improve our visibility and interest in our services has increased dramatically.
Blogger purists will tell you that readership depends on how truly opinionated and newsworthy the blog writer is willing to be – how far out on a limb they’re willing to go – and this is especially true with journalistic blogs. Even when it comes to business blogs, readers want to hear CEO’s and their executive minions talking “smack” about their respective industries, their competitors, and yes, their own companies. They’re usually disappointed though, as is revealed in this great article from USA Today online entitled CEOs refuse to get tangled up in messy blogs.
According to the search engine Technorati, eight and a half million people are writing blogs, up from 100,000 two years ago, and a new one begins every seven seconds. And in this ever-expanding blogosphere, there are a many, many marketing and PR blogs out there today focused on many different industries (although not many in the human capital space – thankfully!), but where are all HR vendor blogs, whether they’re written by the CEO themselves or others in their organizations?
Per our last posting HR Blogs Galore!, there are many noteworthy blogs from HR industry thought leaders, but when we did a brief search for blogs from the pure-play HR vendors in our posting Making More Sense of the Human Capital Industry, we found nothing. Nada. And that surprises us in an industry rich in growth, innovation and transformation.
Now, don’t go throwing apple cores at us if there are HR vendor blogs out there written by the CEO’s or other execs – there might be. We didn’t do an extensive search. If you know of any, please post your comments to this posting.
According to the CEOs refuse to get tangled up in messy blogs article, business blogs written by CEO’s “would slice through traditional media gatekeepers and bring him or her unedited to the desktop of customers, employees, Wall Street analysts and competitors. A blog by a prominent CEO would attract instant traffic, could influence public opinion, perhaps steer legislation and maybe sell a few widgets.”
Pretty powerful stuff, we thinks.
So for those of us in the human capital marketplace, here are four elements of a balanced business blog we recommend that’s sure to increase your visibility and generate leads:
- Provide pertinent and helpful information to your readers – don’t be obviously self-serving in every single post.
- Give nods to other bloggers and important blog postings that you consider pertinent to your readers.
- Have members of your management team write your posts, preferably the CEO (I don’t think we’ve ever mentioned it, but our President and Founder, Mark Willaman, writes our posts, as do I, Kevin Grossman, his loyal executive minion).
- And give your opinions, take some risks, be brave, be honest, be a thought leader, and sound like you know what the heck you’re talking about.
Mmmm…don’t them apples taste good?