I just attended a webinar entitled Blogging, the Google Way. The presenter was Karen Wickre (@kvox), Google’s senior manager of corporation communications. Karen gave the 10,000 foot view of the processes that Google has in place for establishing and maintaining a blog in Google.
- Google has over 150 blogs
- Google has over 80 Twitter accounts
- Just about every blog post is accompanied by a Twitter announcement.
This is pretty common practice these days whether you are a sole proprietor or you’re repesenting a corporation. Lots of bloggers, including myself, write in their blog, shorten the URL at a website like bit.ly where clicks and conversations can be tracked, and then tweet that they just wrote a blog post about “their subject” and paste the bit.ly link at the end of the tweet. - No one in Google is a full-time blogger. Google bloggers are regular salaried employees who blog as part of their job.
- Employees must submit application/request permission to start a blog
- Some blogs are run internally for a period of time in order to determine commitment of staff and to establish the “habit” of writing.
I love this idea, and have recommended in a number of my blog posts over the years that beginning bloggers develop the habit of blogging before moving to a live blog. How to Blog page, Blogging, at Your Website or a Public Site? – 2. (Look at the last time that I blogged. I’ve fallen off the wagon…and now am back on track!) - Blogs are reviewed periodically for frequency of posts and compliance to corporate style and tone.
Top 3 blogging tips from Ms. Wickre that I liked the most:
- A Good Tile is VERY IMPORTANT. They must be short (for RSS readers and mobile devices) and concisely convey the topic.
- Don’t ever delete a post. The readers have already picked it up and placed links in your followers’ inboxes. Deleting a post can create a PR nightmare.
- Make post updates obvious by using the word Update, adding the date and the change, and using a different color font. Strikethroughs (don’t want this any more) are okay. Don’t change the timestamp or the title; just re-publish
I enjoyed the webinar. Google’s approach to blogging is on par with any other corporation that is of its size and stature. I worked for a large corporation (Digital Equipment Corporation) and the processes I heard about today are the same that I would expect Digital to have put in place (if it still existed).
What about you? How does your corporation approach blogging? Is there one voice? One message? One tone?