Online Reputation Management - Blogging Best Practices

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Blogging best practices center more on the target audience and conceptual pretenses. You do still have to worry about the way the blog looks and how its audience sees it. For the most part the blogging software takes care of many of the concerns that we faced with website best practices. If you have questions about the best practices for putting together a website then please refer to my article on website best practices. I have listed several best practices and ideologies for blogging. Implementing these will help you to create the type of online reputation that you desire and aid you in managing your online reputation.

• Understand and be able to deal with the concept that your target audience is taking charge
• Understand and be able to leverage that  most people trust other consumer opinions over all others
• Understand that your marketplace is going to be talked about even if you choose not to engage in the discussion
• Blogs are not special or new. In fact, blog tools are often easier to use and understand than most free email services.
• A blog is just another tool to help establish and manage your online reputation.
•  Everyone, especially target market consumers, can quickly publish their opinion, and others can easily find it quickly
• Business blogging is publishing a message (pushing) and engaging in the conversation with your target market (pulling).
• Listen to others in the blogosphere. Start listening to what is going on in your marketplace, or consider hiring a company to monitor and report on the blogging in your target market. There are varieties of tools that can help you do this, but this part of your online reputation management is a full time job.
• Create an atmosphere of conservative creativity within your organization and define what is acceptable to blog about and what is not. Create a public disclosure policy and disclose it to your employees. Even if your company is not going to engage in blogging, you need to communicate what is acceptable and what is not acceptable to employees.
• Take time to plan your blog’s purpose and strategy after careful consideration of your target audience. Do not just start blogging. Have a concrete plan of attack and retreat if necessary.
• Do not waiver from your plan and stay on topic. Wavering makes people think you are unfocused and that you do not pay attention to detail.
• Always be authentic. Avoid embellishment or false claims. These will do more to damage your online reputation that you can imagine.
• Do not write your blog like it is a press release. A blog is an informal conversation about your content and company.
• You need to commit to blogging at least once a day. Once you get the blog established, you may be able to find someone who is already is an established blogger and willing to commit to providing content.
• Your blog posts do not need to be excessively long.  Research shows that short posts about relevant topics will help you break the ice on the conversation.
• An ideal candidate for blogging is a person who is already adept with the online environment, can consume and effectively present large amounts of information and can recognize industry trends.
• It is important to design your to fit your target marketplace. (Use the best practices for web design article that I recently published)  Create a URL that is uniquely descriptive to your target market discussion and format your blog to align with your overall offline and online reputation strategy.
• Discuss best practices and relevant information in your industry presented as information or a resource. You should not aggrandize yourself, when you present your expertise in your target area your readers will eventually realize that you comprehend and effectively implement best practices.
• In order to gain more marketplace visibility you should strategically provide links to other resources that your readers might find of value. Put some thought into this before you implement. The best rule of thumb here is that you r resources point to others that help fill the needs of your readers that you do not.
• Make sure your blog is easily readable and easy to use. Bloggers occasionally write long, hard to digest paragraphs full of information. In order to e more effective, split the text into smaller sized formats and use bullet points.  Use the same techniques for written communication that you do in offline marketing. Use formatting to emphasize and differentiate important points.
• You should use images, as appropriate, to enhance your content and to help illustrate important points in your content. You should try to be creative with this tactic and not use the most obvious image, think a little deeper and go for a relational idea or metaphor.
• Read other blogs in your target marketplace. This is a great way to listening to what is going on in your marketplace.
• Proofread your blog for grammar and spelling errors. Use a naturally sensible and conversational tone as if you were actually speaking to your audience in a public setting.
• Leave comments on other blogs in your target audience marketplace. You should also provide a link back to your blog so people can find your blog if they want to learn more
• Reward your advocates and loyal contributors with kudos and support for their endeavors. This will help you to strengthen marketplace relationships that are win-win.
• Develop a strategy to counter your detractors, consider employing the help of your advocates in strategically flanking your detractors.
• Do not beg for site-links or link exchanges. You should spend your time figuring out ways to get people to link to your blog because of your content.
• Be diligent in responding to comments and questions from your audience. You goal is to keep the conversation going so you can pull valuable information from your target audience so you can provide them with what they need.
• You do not need to have the whole world linking to your blog or reading your blog; your focus should be about connecting with your target audience.
• If you buy or use a free template for your blog style, try to find template that is not too cluttered, sometimes having too many blog features will distract your target audience from your message.
• Be polite and ask permission from others that you would like to publish on your blog. If someone sends you a great email you may want to publish it, but be careful, you do not want to offend the sender.
• Do not engage in negative criticism of others in your marketplace. Be thoughtful and pay attention to what you are trying to accomplish.
• Talk about your competitors. The marketplace will respect you if you can take a dignified approach to showing your strengths as compared to theirs.
• No one wants to read a boring blog, but cheap entertainment only brings in a few visits. You should be a subject matter expert in your marketplace.
• Register your blog with indexers. feedster, technoratie, ice rocket, google, yahoo, pubsub, and others.
• Use analytics to monitor and understand the traffic coming to your site, at minimum, Google Analytics (free) or another server based tool.
• If you have multiple target audience strategies, you will need multiple bloggers that focus in on each of those areas individually.
• Once you have some content, let the analysts in your industry know that you are blogging. You can either give them a call or link to their blog if they have one.
• Devise a plan for how to handle bad news, a company crisis or blog detractors. You must decide if you will engage, ignore or redirect these issues. Different companies handle this with a variety of public relations methods, plan in advance what the best strategy is for your online reputation.
• Public Relations are not dead, in fact, they have just started, and blogging is now part of it.  Blogs are the new public relations tool of choice.
• Do not hire marketing firms to help develop your a blog strategy if they are not blogging themselves. If they do not do it, or do it poorly, then how can they help you?
• When writing in your blog, use the language that your target audience uses; avoid using terms that are too industry specific.
• Find or train a blogging expert to help guide your blogging strategy. This person may or may not be your corporate blogger, but find someone that can guide, provide best practices, and get the tools in motion.
• Seek out industry blog leaders, read their work, talk to them and hire them if necessary.
• Ask offline neutral third party advisors to provide feedback about your blog. Negative feedback as well as positive feedback will be helpful.
• For long posts, use text editors for grammar and spelling. Edit and reduce your content before posting.
• Do not disappear for long periods between posts. Your readers will disappear as well. You must post on a regular basis so that it gets readers into the pattern of constantly wondering what they are missing by not reading your blog today.
• Develop thick skin. People may besmirch your company, your products, your ideas and maybe even you.
• Be very cautious when starting a blogging program. Take your time and make a plan. Do not just start trying things out. If you make a mistake, you may have to spend countless hours and dollars repairing your errors.
• Your online reputation depends on your input as much as the input of others.

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Written by: David C Skul - CEO

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