Don’t Let Your Brand Suffer from Bad Blogging Skills

by dthomas on November 3, 2011

Company blogging - should you? shouldn't you?

For many companies, blogs are either a major point of interest or they get little to no attention. So what happens if your company’s blog is, in fact, potentially damaging your company’s brand?

Do you pull it entirely? Do you rework it in order to improve the company brand? Or do you just leave things the way they are and deal with it later?

If your company’s blog is leaving you with a number of question marks, here are some factors to consider:

Is the blog offering major benefits to our company or not? – In the event you’re having questions, list the pros and cons of the blog. If there are more negative aspects than positive reasons for keeping the blog, you may want to can it;
Is the blog taking too much time away from staff responsibilities? – Measure the time and effort spent on the blog. Is it costing the people running it too much of one, or both? You may determine that their resources can be better spent elsewhere, instead of on the blog;
Is the blog potentially damaging our credibility as a company? Another factor to look at is the credibility of your blog. Is it putting your company in a potentially negative light? Are you getting complaints about it? With negative information only taking seconds to whip around the Internet, just one slip up on the blog could be devastating for your business;
Is it wise to simply up and remove the blog? To just abandon the blog without any explanation could be more damaging – from a PR sense – than continuing it. Take the time to decide if removing the blog presents more issues than solutions.

Faceless company blogging

While your company may be or may not be ready to answer some or all of those questions, keep in mind that a bad blog can do quite an amount of harm to your company’s branding efforts.

Among the signs your company’s blog could be causing you problems are:

You spend excessive time on your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and less time on cranking out useful blog material;
You’re very intermittent when it comes to posting on the company blog site. To the reader, you’re pointing out that the blog is not a high priority with the company. Hence, what else may not be high on the priority list regarding your products and/or services? The dedication to the blog needs to be there from the start;

Confrontation Central

You use the blog to confront customers. While some customers may take to your blog to comment in a negative manner on your products and/or services, it doesn’t behoove you to trash them in return. If you’re using the company blog to engage customers in a negative manner, it can certainly reflect badly on the business;
You have a blog that isn’t search engine friendly. Make sure your company blog has solid headlines, keyword links and is updated regularly. The more you follow these rules, the better your blog will rank among the search engines.

A company blog is not rocket science, but it does take some solid planning and thought. Without both of those, your ability to profit from a company blog is slim to none.

Guest post by Dave Thomas

Dave Thomas is an expert writer on items like POS systems and is based in San Diego, California. He writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs at Resource Nation.