Corporate Blogging and Credibility

So, one of the ideas that I've latched onto and advised my customers (and prospective customers) to do is a "corporate blog".

Corporate Blogging - Friend or Foe

Businessweek and Fortune and all those junky business magazines are telling you that maybe it's a good idea, but also that it can be bad and blah blah blah.

Why the heck is it a bad idea to 1) with a low cost in terms of money and time 2) communicate your message to your customers 3) engage customers in a dialog about your service/product 4) help future customers find you--since blogs will help you get links and search engine results 5) have a little fun!

Well, I was reading an article on Kuro5hin that describes how to bootstrap a "web company" in 2 months and they had this great line about raising venture capital:

Now there are tons of articles out there on how to attract cash if you have an idea so I'm not going to go into it because we didn't go that route and to be honest all those articles seem like bullshit written by some 40 year old guy that thinks he's hip because he has a hosted blog.

So, the venture capital part is interesting, but the part that struck me was the part that I put in bold above. If you have a website and then create your own blog for yourself on blogger and then stick a link between them it's going to look cheap, it's not going to have the right theme, and after many many hours of your work it's still going to look like a cheap and disjointed separate part of the site. Your customers are not going to be excited and it won't help you gain credibility, links, or search engine results.

But how do I do "corporate blogging" the RIGHT way

Well, step one is to have a decent website from the beginning. Which, if you're like most small businesses it was an afterthought that you either got your nephew to do or you hired someone for too much who did too little and getting them to help any more is a real pain.

With a GVS website you've already got yourself a decent framework on which to base site. One that is modular and allows you to quickly add more features at a later date. You decide to add blogging to the site and poof: integrated with all of the theming that you've already done we add a blogging system that will look good and will be integrated with the other features of your site. A listing of your "recent blog entries" can be placed in a menu item on the home page and it has an RSS feed so that people know when to check back for updated entries. You're golden.

Physician, heal thy...

And if that was too subtle of an introduction, here's the beginning of the GVS "corporate blog".