What Do You Look for in a Blog?

What advice would you give to a corporation just starting their blog?

Here’s mine:

Dear New Corporate Blogger,
You’ll have a fine line to tread as you embark on your new job duties. Remember that most blog readers (65.7%) read for entertainment, and only 12.3% read for work. Very few people are coming to your blog to hear about how your ISO inspection went and how happy you are that everything is safely in document control in triplicate. Readers want to be entertained.

Does that mean every post should be linkbait or Diggworthy? Not necessarily. Sometimes the entertainment value in a blog doesn’t come from the subject of the post but the way it’s written.

Write about how you felt being grilled on the minutiae of your procedures. Tell how it reminded you of the second grade play where you got stage fright and forgot your lines. Tell how you think there should be a better system for getting ISO certified and how ISO is killing the earth. Give your opinion that global warming is all because of ISO. (Man, don’t you wish you were blogging about ISO now? There’s like four free post ideas!)

More free advice:

• Before you start, strive to create a “blogging culture” and generate internal support for your blog.
• You must sound like a normal human, not a press release. Tell how you feel and what you think.
• But you must also be very careful what you say.
• Write about the industry; don’t just tout your products.
• Really engage with conversation with your readers.
• Link to other sites–yes, even though this might send visitors away (the horror!)
• Don’t “go negative” all the time. It’s ugly.
• Post regularly and at the very least once a week.
• Good luck!

—From one blogger to another

Now it’s your turn: I couldn’t think of a better way to wrap up the series on corporate blogging last week than to ask for readers’ input.

What draws you to the blogs you read? What would you recommend, as a blog reader and/or blogger, to help corporate bloggers just starting out? How can a corporate blog be professional yet entertaining and still leave readers with a positive impression of the brand/product?