Question: Help us settle an internal debate. When it comes to our company Blog, should our content be written conversationally or should we keep it formal?
This is a terrific question and a great opportunity to open a dialogue on what a company blog is all about.
Believe it or not, only 1 in 8 companies have a business blog, so while it seems that everyone on the planet is blogging, the statistics would say otherwise. This also means a lot of companies don’t know the power of content and its relationship to acquiring customers. What I’m really trying to say here is you are not alone in wondering how your content should read.
Now, to answer your specific question…
When it comes to your blog, I think you should look at it as an opportunity to converse with your customers. Therefore the written word can and should be written much like the spoken word. Think of how you may interact directly with a customer and try to write like that.
Now, if you are a very formal communicator in person, it isn’t a terrible idea to let that come across in your writing.
A blog is all about creating a digital personality for your company. Essentially allowing people to get a feel for the brand and the people behind it. So whatever you do, you want it to be an authentic representation of what they are going to get when they meet you or someone from your organization live.
The last thing you want is for someone to say, “You’re so much different than what I expected.”
So here are a few real simple recommendations if you are getting started or aggressively trying to grow your company’s online blog.
- Be Authentic: Write like you speak. This is one place where that is definitely acceptable.
- Ask Questions: The purpose of a blog isn’t only to have answers, but to engage and promote conversation. Questions are a great way to do this.
- Solve Problems: Provide answers to your potential and current customers biggest challenges. Ideally not in a know it all fashion but in a way that will harness appreciation and brand loyalty
- Stay Consistent: Write regularly and have consistency in your voice (Can vary with multiple authors). Having a blog page vs. having an active blog is the difference between blogging strategies that drive conversions and stale pages on the headers of a website.
In short, write away and let the blog speak for the brand. If your brand wants to be fun and innovative, make sure the written words represent that.
Best of luck and keep writing. Content is the future (and the now) so you are off to a great start!
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Daniel Newman is the co-founder of V3*Broadsuite and is an experienced C-level executive, serving as a strategy consultant for small and mid-sized businesses. He’s also an insight/analyst partner to four Fortune 50 enterprises and previously served as the co-founder and CEO of EC3, a hosted IT and communications services provider. Prior to that, he served as the CEO of United Visual, Inc. in Chicago Illinois.
He is a widely published writer who contributes weekly to Forbes, Entrepreneur, Huffington Post and industry publications such as Commercial Integrator, Sound & Communication and Corporate Tech Decisions. He’s also author of three best-selling business books including The New Rules of Customer Engagement, The Millennial CEO, and just recently Evolve: Marketing (^as we know it) is Doomed.
Daniel has established a reputation as a leading thinker in topics such as Social, Big Data, Cloud and Mobile. He has been named to many top influencer lists in all of these areas, including recognition by the Huffington Post as one of the 100 business and leadership accounts to follow on Twitter. He is also an adjunct professor of management at North Central College.