If you are planning a blogging strategy for your B2B marketing or running a company blog, one of the biggest challenges you face is asking your colleagues to write blog posts. And when you do that, one of the most common questions you get to hear is – ‘So what should I blog about?’
This question
is not always easy to answer. After all how are you supposed to know what the
other person should blog! But the problem that your colleagues are facing
is obvious. A hectic day to day schedule often does not leave much time to blog
for the company and even if they are determined to create a post, thinking of
the right topic is always a challenge for people who are not frequent bloggers.
Since a lot
of companies must be facing similar problems, I thought it might be a good idea
to create a blog styling guide to help people get an idea of various B2B
blogging formats that they can explore.
However,
please see that blogging is a way to socially express yourself and there can be
no universal template. Hence please feel free to explore your own formats /
styles to write articles. But if you are looking for ideas to write blog post
or to suggest post to others, this style guide is for you.
What
formats can you write:
A) Research - In
this blogging format you share your research on certain topics and come up with
a conclusion. Such types of posts make more sense when your job involves a lot
of research. You can dig into a particular subject and come out with trends and
insights. Here you can also talk about best practices in a particular domain,
best examples of certain things etc
For example
you can see a research post on benchmark
examples of B2B Facebook landing pages, a research post on how
banks and financial institutions are using social media, 20
examples of F-Commerce beyond F-Stores and my post on how
world’s top brands are adopting social media
B) How
to-s - This is a
format where you are educating or teaching somebody how to solve a particular
problem. This very post belongs to the same category. Such blogs become very
easy to write when you work on new problems
As examples,
see this blog post by mashable on how to create
online communities , Open Forum article on how to encourage
your whole company to blog.
C) Share - In this format you start with
sharing something thought provoking - a video / excerpt of another blog post /
picture / podcast and add your opinion on top of it. This kind of format in
increasingly becoming popular with bloggers since it is short in size and comes
as an outcome of your daily research
For example
see this blog post from 37 signals where the writer is sharing
a video and adding his opinions on top of it, Kaushal Sarda’s post
where he shares videos on designing
next generation cameras
D) Documentation
of ideas or upcoming projects –
Many companies believe in open research, i.e. they believe in sharing their
ideas and thoughts with the community. These companies believe in the
philosophy that sharing emerging ideas with the community aids in making them
better.
If you are a
part of such a company and are working on a new idea, it is good to document
and blog about it. Apart from the obvious benefits it brings as an added blog
post, documenting your thoughts helps you clear them in your head and provides
a ready reference you can hit back.
As examples,
see Gauravonomics post on his idea
of a novel and a complimenting social game and my post on how thought
leadership in B2B companies can be gamified
E) Opinions - Your thoughts on a popular
subject or trending topic etc. You can use various listening tools like
Alterian SM2, Radian 6 or even Twitter to see what is trending in your areas of
expertise.
You can see
this post on why
investors love social commerce and why
single people should not start-up(interesting... eh ;) )
F) Cases
and learning: You
handled some situations in a project and learnt something valuable; hence you
are documenting it, so that others in the company / community can learn. As an
example you can see this post on learnings from Amazon outage – building
fault tolerant systems on cloud
G) Any
other format -
there are actually many other possible formats / structures. If you use any
other format - add to the thread.
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