Laura’s Winning Ideas

Your firm may be considering a business blog.
If so, here are a variety of approaches to a business blog you might want to consider floating to the Execs:

Diary mode

This one is VERY scary. A person or two or three, post to the blog regularly. They sort-of talk about business and sort-of don’t. Maybe they are moderated, but that doesn’t seem to work so well unless they are senior execs and accustomed to the legal ramifications of speaking too freely. A popular blog that fits this style is Scoblelizer.

Robert Scoble worked for Microsoft under the title Corporate Evangelizer. He is now leaving to work for PodCast and taking his blog with him.

These blogs survive on the poster’s opinion. If they are compelling and you come to agree with what they say, you’ll love this style of blog. If you disagree with their approach or philosophy, you’ll dislike this particular blog. There’s the rub. These can be polarizing.

Topic mode

My blog is focused on a topic, Winning Proposals. While some posts (like this one) don’t mention proposals much at all, it’s a conversation between myself (and my visitors) and proposal managers and their executives. Part coach, part gossip about what will help you win, intended to give prospective clients some idea of how I work, and to help proposal meisters cope.

There are quite a few of these in the PR and marketing realm, and some technical areas of IT. In the future we’ll see most topics covered in a blog or 20.

These have a smaller dose of opinion, but are definitely more ‘essay from experience’ than news-wire.

News mode

These are blogs that search and post news items of interest to a particular segment. Tracy Coenen’s blog is one of these. Her firm, Sequence Inc. provides forensic accounting consultation. As an expert witness, she can’t be taking positions, and is professionally discrete in her work. So how can she use a blog?

Her approach is to be a news-wire about Fraud. As you can imagine, she doesn’t have to scramble to find material. If you are a stockholder, investor or accountant, this is fascinating reading. If you are an auditor or a corporate attorney, this is required reading.

There’s one variation on this I found, which promotes interactivity. A translation firm has a news mode blog on Ethics and encourages submission of confessions from readers. The confession is then posted for readers to vote on the acceptability of the ethical infringement. I thought this was clever until I read through the confessions and noted the lack of ethical fortitude displayed by the readers. It is a bit frightening, and I’m hoping the rating calculator is broken.

If the calculator is working properly, Sequence Inc. has an even brighter future than I suspect.