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Importance of a company blog
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When Nick Mehta joined LiveOffice as CEO in May of 2008, one of the first things he did in his new position was create a company blog, which is positioned fairly prominently on the e-mail and archiving company's home page. Although the Torrance, California, company's founders Alex Rusich and Matt Smith had already built a sizable team of about 100 and created a system and bond across that team, Mehta wanted to create more of a voice.
These days, more and more companies - both big and small - are seeing the importance of constant interaction between employees and customers. With the way people now use blogs, social networks and other online discussions forums, companies are doing the same to create not only a personality but also openness and transparency.
Mehta's opening blog on May 15th introduced himself as the new CEO, talked about his background and highlighted why he was excited to join the LiveOffice team. But even before getting into all that, he set the tone for blogs to come by talking football. "I love football and my beloved Pittsburg Steelers," he says in the first line (we'll disregard his choice team for now), "but one of my favorite aspects of football is the blank slate and eternal optimism that accompanies the new season for every team.
"I kind of feel that way about new jobs that we take periodically in our careers," the blog continues. "There is nothing like the feeling of walking into a company and realizing how much unknown excitement lies ahead of you."
A year and a half later, Mehta still regularly blogs, with topics ranging from e-mail and security to Governor Schwarzenegger and the movie Groundhog Day. I decided to sit down with the company-blog proponent and get his insight on the topic (and talk a little football).
I think a really neat aspect of your company is it's voice. But when you started, why did you think LifeOffice needed a blog?
I'm a big believer in communicating externally to customers and internally to employees. The only way to have a great company is to have employees that love the company and everything will come from there. So I spend a lot of time communicating with them. Equivalent to my blog I have an e-mail I send to the employees. Part of being a good leader is being open.
What do you write about? How do you pick your topics?
It's challenging to decide what to blog about. I try to be very personal. I tell people I have three things in my life: my family, the Pittsburg Steelers and LiveOffice. So I tell all my employees and customers about those things. [Otherwise] we really try to cover topics related to our industry and what our customers are interested in. A lot of blogs are about what we're doing: new products, partnerships, for example. But that's pretty inwardly focused and moderately interesting. So what we try to do that's more interesting is cover what's happening in the news. E-mail, for better or worse, is always kind of hidden in the headlines. What's Google doing? What's Microsoft doing? The challenge is purely just keeping up, so I subscribe to and read other blogs, too.
I know you pioneered the blog at LiveOffice, but do you still do all the blogging, while playing CEO at the same time?
I started it and blog as much as possible, but we've since made it a team effort. That's what I had eventually wanted to do. The blogosphere is purely about keeping up and there's a lot to keep track of. So we ended up hiring a full-time media person [aside from the company's full-time PR rep] who's responsible for managing our social media, Twittering, coordinating our blog. I started out doing it myself, but we really needed someone on it full time.
Be honest, do people read your blogs?
I'm not Perez Hilton, but we get a decent number of page hits and comments. Even more so we'll get people saying they read our blogs. I think 99 percent of blog readers are passive, so they don't comment online, but they do read it. It's interesting, because I'll go meet a customer and they'll say, "Hey, I read your blog and really liked what you wrote about X, Y and Z." So that [shows that] it's actually really effective.
Ok, what tips would you give for business leaders thinking about starting a company blog?
#1 You have to be involved in some way. You don't have to be doing it all, but you have to be aware and a champion of it.
#2 It has to be authentic. This is not a press release. It's got to be real analysis and written in an authentic voice, a little more personal.
#3 It has to be pretty timely. That's a challenge, because how do you stay on top of all the news? But people don't care about news three days after it happened. They care about news when it happens.
#4 You have to be involved in the larger blogosphere. Follow what other people are writing and comment on other blogs. There's a lot to that as well.
#5 It has to be relevant to what readers want. I can blog about product announcements, but readers are more interested in things in the news. To the extent that we can write about those things, the customers reading it can say "LifeOffice, that's a company that thinks like I do." And one of our big goals is relating to our customers, getting them to feel a connection to us. Once you have the connection, they'll be more likely to listen to you.
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