MatthewVB

Now we’re flooded online with everyone wanting to use the word “buzz” and today, I’m blogging about BzzAgent, the online/offline word-of-mouth buzz building company. For the record, my favorite two online “buzz” are my friends at BOL and The Buzz Report.  Now back to BzzAgent.

I’ve been running my own blog for quite some time now, over 7 years. The question at hand here is the value of corporate blogging. BzzAgent ran Bzz.com for quite some time (it was an on-again off-again relationship, currently off-again) as their corporate blog. Major companies have blogs to say what’s going on: Microsoft’s Channel 9, Google, Dell, and even universities pushing blogs. What makes a blog successful for a company is better described by Joel Spolsky:

…an entrepreneur’s blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. [via]

BzzAgent can learn from this simple, yet complex concept. People don’t want to read a blog to just find out what’s going on in a company – they want  to get involved and have a personal connection. Joel provides a few great examples (same source):

If you’re opening a restaurant, don’t blog about your menu. Blog about great food. You’ll attract foodies who don’t care about your restaurant yet.

If you make superior, single-source chocolate, don’t write about that great trip you took to the Dominican Republic to source cocoa beans. That’s all about you. Instead, write the definitive article about making chocolate-covered strawberries.

Why do this? Because people will care more about these things and build associations with you – rather than your random rants/banter online. Ryan Bates provides free (and amazing) tutorials (Railscasts) on Ruby on Rails (a programming language). Ryan is providing useful information while setting himself up for success. I don’t care if Ryan goes out and gets a dog or travels to India – but if I have a question or need a great developer, I know that he’s there and I know he’s dedicated to his work.

The key to success is not easy – it takes time and devotion. Just writing this blogs eats a good hour weekly — finding great links, relevant info, citing sources, etc. Take the time, develop great content, and the people will come.