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.

Corporations: blogging should be working for you, after all you need to blog . . . but how?

Of course, I don’t think I could do this series without mentioning Andy’s business blog consulting services. Here are just a few resources for corporate bloggers on everything from finding readers to writing.

Complete Feeds
These are blogs where every post or almost every post relates directly to skills and techniques you’ll want to implement.
Copyblogger: writing
ProBlogger: promotion, writing and more
Creating Passionate Users: make your visitors fans and your fans fanatics.
Business Blog Consulting (which doesn’t actually offer consulting services): blogging advice
Church of the Consumer Blog: turn your fanatics into evangelists

Categories on larger feeds
SEOmoz: Blogging
Marketing Pilgrim: Blogging and Reputation Management (of course)

Outstanding Posts
Neil Patel’s 50 Favorite Blogging Resources—including a whole section on corporate blogging.
An old-but-still-totally-valid post by Robert Scoble, the Corporate Weblog Manifesto.
Jeremiah Owyang’s Blogging Resources List and Index and Web Strategy: How to be a Corporate Blog Evangelist.

Last week, Rand Fishkin accurately identified several reasons why Fortune 500s and other large corporations can’t blog. While I found myself vehemently agreeing with everything he said, I got to the end and wanted to hear the other side of the story. (It’s a character flaw.) I thought I’d give it a shot.

If you’re a big enough brand, people are already interested in you
They’re probably talking about you. They may even be interested in what you have to say. You have a built in audience. There are about 50 million bloggers who would kill to have that.

MarketingSherpa’s boasting a case study on how to get famous with viral marketing in one year (available free for a limited time). The subject of the case study isn’t the type of company I think of when I think “viral marketing success”—Arbor Networks is an enterprise security software company. But they made a goal for 2006 to be their “Big Year of Fame,” and created a comprehensive viral marketing strategy to accomplish their goal.

They set three ground rules for the campaign:

#1. Don’t blow your budget on a single campaign
#2. Don’t rely entirely on one single media
#3. Look different from the rest of the pack

To comply with Rule #1, Arbor diversified their campaign to attack in various forms, including podcasting, blogging, and an online game, while still maintaining the output of their popular white papers.