As part of our blog marketing services we advise and assist companies in getting their blogs up and running. Usually its the CEO or the VP or Marketing tht wants to get the the blog on! The SEO benefits of having a corporate blog (especially for smaller companies) are huge. In week or even days these companies can start “owning” important business keyworks. Here are some of our own little example:

• Widget Best Practicies (#1)
• enterprise widget developer (#1)
• Yahoo TV widget developer (#3)
• political widget developer (#4)
• flash widget development (#4)
• and the list goes on and on and by just by once again incorporating these keywords into by blog post, I am getting SEO credit, how sweet!

Indeed, nice choice keyword you don’t have to pay for! Free traffic delivered (daily) to you, courtesy of your blog! A VP of marketing’s dream come true! We have software internally that keeps track of keywords you “own” and keywords you “want to own” and tell you how well you are blogging. This magic machines tells clients daily what they should blog about. But keywords are not enough, you need content to “carry” them (bummer) and many times our braze corporate blogger is short on ideas, he or she is simply “blogged out” or “blogged down”.  So we keep a primer on the types of blog posts one can write about your company. Again, you spin the magic wheel and it tells you: “Today you need to blog about corporate culture”. If you don’t like the suggestion, you spin the wheel again! You get the idea!

Here is a list of corporate blog post types..hopefully this will help some of the corporate bloggers out there keep their blogs nice and fresh and prevent that corporate staleness that sets in after the first week of “Look Ma no hands, Look Ma ain’t blogging grand!”

• Company News:
  General company new announcement
  • Example: Company announces partnership or product release
• Internal Company Story:
  Story about an internal event, policy or happening that illustrates some important aspect of the company culture, philosophy or attitudes.
  • Example: Our Search for a New VP of Engineering
• Trend Piece:
  Interest piece summarizing industry trends or market research
  • Example: SMS and Text-messaging grows at alarming rate
• Industry Piece (“Big Picture” Piece):
  Interest piece on the industry that either summarizes the competitive landscape, talks about new or important issues or developments
  • Example: How new legislature affects the real estate industry
• Customer profile, testimonial or highlight:
  Examination of how a customer is using company’s service or product to be successful. Great away to reward active customers and encourage other customers to do the same. This can also be done as a podcast.
  • Example: How GE saved millions of dollars with our new platform.
• “How To” or “Application” piece:
  Post that explains how to use a feature or service, or how a service can be used for a new application.
  • Example: How to post to Craigslist using our service.
• New Feature or Product Release:
  Summary of new features or capabilities, can be combined with a “How To” post.
  • Example: Company adds Mobile and SMS support
• Press mentions, awards or news summaries:
  Summary of recent news, press or blog mentions. Great way to tout ones own horn to customers and partners.
  • Example: Here is analysts had to say about our product launch
  • Example: News and Buzz surrounding our new product release
• Upcoming events:
  Post to announce upcoming event or release
• Interesting or humorous news piece:
  Interest piece about peculiar, humorous or interesting story relating to the company, a customer experience, service/product or industry
• User survey or poll:
  Asking readers to take a short poll or survey.
  • Example: Please rate upcoming features?
  • Example: How do you use instant messaging with our product?
• “Fishing Expedition” Post:
  Asking readers if they are interested in a new service you are offering or planning to offer
  • Example: Looking for sponsors to pilot a new service.
  • Example: Looking for beta users for new product.

Food for blog thought! And remember to incorporate that sweet “buzzword compliant” industry techno bable into your posts, otherwise you’re wasting your companies time and money. Joking..but enjoy and hopefully you won’t run out of blog post ideas!

A couple of weeks ago I did a post featuring some social media marketing examples I found being maitained by enterpreneur Peter Kim. His original post contained a great list of examples of how large consumer brands are using social media in their marketing efforts.

Some of our clients have asked for more detailed examples or examples specific to their industry so we are in the process of creating an internal database of social media marketing best practices and examples and try to marrying them with performance analytics and commentary (social media is great..but what works and what doesn’t work!)

We are looking for social media marketing examples, specific to the following industries:

• Aerospace & Defense
• Pharma
• Energy & Utilities
• Retail
• Travel

If know of any, please feel free to post a comment or send us an email at: socialmedia-012@metablocks2.com!

Last year we designed a unique airport portal concept (see draft) for one of the leading travel search engines. The idea was to create a content hub for business travelers that would bring together all the relevant travel information by focusing on their point of departure and their final destination – airports. The airport portal would provide information on average check in times, flight delays, security alerts, airport productivity tips, airport maps and other information, as well as access to airline flight schedules and reservations.

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During the design process, we tried to incorporate as many Web 2.0 portal best practices as possible, some of these include:

• Enabling Personalization and Customization
• Integating Ecommerce
  In today’s web economy, monetization is key. Incorporate as much revelent ecommerce and advertising in your portal.
• Incorporating User Generated Content
  User-generated content can key to a successful web-based community. Having travelers blog about their airport experience in real-time provides other travelers with important, time-saving information about what is going on the ground.
• Mashup, Mashup, Mashup
  Mashups allow you to deliver compelling applications quickly and cost effectively.
• Keeping it Graphic
  There is nothing more boring than an all text portal. Try and tell your story using more graphics and less text.
• Using Free Content
  There is a lot of free content either in the public domain (airport information), from the government (airport updates), or generated by users (forums, blogs) than you can incorporate in your portal. Identify it, make sure its free, and incorporate it properly into your portal.
• Using Widget and Portlets
  Packaging applications and information as widgets, modules or portlets not only makes them easier to develop and deliver but also allows users to better customize their online experience.

We recently helped our client The Printed Blog with the design of their website and corporate brand.  The Printed Blog, currently in beta, just got written up in the Wired Blog in an article that talks about the site’s unique approach:

As old media races to catch up with the Web and figure out how to successfully monetize print content online, one publication is taking a drastically different approach: web to print.

Founded by serial entrepreneur Joshua Karp, The Printed Blog essentially wants to bring “the Best of the Web to your newsstand” by publishing a regular newspaper featuring news and editorial from popular blogs.  In designing The Printed Blog corporate site, we tried to go for a very clean consumer-ish look that would appeal to potential advertisers, partners and press – yet at the same time would remain distinctly Web 2.0. Tell us what you think of the design!