More and more companies are hiring a CBO (that’s Chief Blogging Officer for those of you who missed that latest acronym).
At Achievant we don’t have a CBO but rather our entire senior team shares the responsibility to blog. We each focus our blog on our areas of expertise. Mine typically focuses on HR topics, system capabilities and our HR consulting services. Others on our team focus on technology (http://blog.achievant.com/blog/hris-software-technology) and sales.
The number of companies which are blogging is growing rapidly. Today, more than 11 percent of Fortune 500 companies have corporate blogs according to SocialText, this is up from 4 percent in 2005. At first it was more of a fad and everyone was jumping on the bandwagon saying ‘this is really cool, we should do it too’ without approaching it thoughtfully with a plan. It is really like any other marketing strategy and now finally companies are evaluating blogs as tools.
For us, our blogs are to:
- Communicate with potential clients about the technology and services we offer
- Provide existing client yet another connection with us
- Convey to potential employees the culture of the organization.
- Share the brand experience of working with our company
I like that we don’t have a corporate blog, but rather individual contributors, as it would be difficult for any one person to completely convey what it is like to do business with us. However, I can certainly see the need for the position as it is really hard work to blog regularly (although it is a great creative outlet).
We regularly track statics of visitors (new and returning), page views, and RSS feeds using Compendium Blogware (http://www.compendiumblogware.com). If you don’t already, I encourage you to subscribe to my blog via a RSS feed.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a way for content publishers to make news, blogs, and other content available to subscribers. You can add your favorite RSS Feeds (such as my blog) as subscriptions in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. The benefit of RSS is that it aggregates of all content from multiple Web sources in one place. You no longer have to visit different Web sites for news, weather, blogs, and other information. With RSS, summaries of content are delivered to you, and then you decide which specific articles you want to read by clicking a link.
You can add an RSS Feed through the Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Account Settings dialog box as outlined below:
1. On the Tools menu, click Account Settings.
2. On the RSS Feeds tab, click New.
3. In the New RSS Feed dialog box, type or press CTRL+V to paste the URL of the RSS Feed. For mine, http://blog.achievant.com/blog/hris-software-services.
4. Click Add.
5. Click OK.
Yes, of course a blogger benefits when you subscribe to their blog. But even better, you benefit. “Home” delivery (for free) of blogs is perhaps the greatest bargain on the Internet. You can get my blog by email every day setting up the RSS feed.
