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As a blogger I completely understand why the medium is growing in popularity. It allows anyone – even technical bumpkins like me – to immediately publish content on the web without a fuss. The PR industry has recognised the rewards and dangers of the medium, helping clients manage their own blogs and generating content for them.

The problem with most blogs generated by PR companies and other agencies is that they often have to adhere to restrictive corporate guidelines and the results read like press releases. The compelling thing about the best blogs is that they offer a voyeuristic taste of people’s existence. They also thrive on being a counter-cultural force – the voice of the individual set against the corporate big boys. Once you lose this authenticity, the blog runs the risk of being labelled a phoney or simply fails to entertain. The worst that can happen is that the blog is ‘outed’ by genuine bloggers as a PR job and the resulting ‘blogswarm’ ends up damaging the brand.

Geek unleashed
There are simple practical ways to avoid this. Give the blog to someone interesting at ground level within your organisation (for instance, a lead developer at a software company) and free them to tell it as they see it. The classic example is Microsoft employee and über-geek Robert Scoble’s Scobleizer blog. His blog gave Microsoft, normally considered to be secretive and aggressive, a huge amount of positive PR.

The magnificent seven
However, this only solves part of the problem. The real issue for most companies is that very few of their employees know how to write engagingly – and the task of writing for blogs needs a specialised skillset in itself. Rufus Leonard and other agencies run specialised writers workshops that can meet this need. However, to get you started, here’s my checklist of seven golden rules for writing a blog from within your brand.

1. Write every day!
Or better still, two or three times a day. A blog will go stale quickly if new content isn’t generated regularly. It may seem difficult to write something interesting every single day, but if you’re involved in something that people take an interest in and you can give them the inside scoop, then even pretty trivial things can be engaging.

2. Keep each entry short and sweet
Most people online, even intelligent ones, have the attention span of gnats. Therefore, as a rule of thumb, I wouldn’t recommend an entry of more than three or four paragraphs – and that’s probably pushing it.

3. Don’t be afraid to express an opinion
Interestingly, brands benefit from the people that blog from within them being human beings. Do you like a competitor’s product? Say so. Think your company’s made a strategic mistake? Write about it. Funnily enough, people think better of a company that allows freedom of thought.

4. Avoid politics, race, gender and sexuality
OK, I know I just said you should express honest opinions, but try to avoid the old-fashioned conversational faux-pas. Having freedom of expression is essential to a good blog, but you still represent your brand. Even if you think your political opinions are common sense, you can guarantee that you’ll offend someone out there and tarnish your brand’s reputation. By the same token, keep it clean. A potty-mouth doesn’t impress anyone. (Of course, if your brand is Gordon Ramsay or a political party, then ignore this entire item!)

5. Take the rough with the smooth
One of the great features of blogs is that visitors can leave comments. This means you could come in for abuse, as well as support from your public. Don’t respond by deleting negative comments. This will smack of censorship. If you respond to comments, always be polite.

6. Build a community around yourself
You can register your blog on sites like Technorati and still not guarantee many visits. The best way to build an audience (without a promotional budget or links from your brand’s official site) is by including reciprocal links in your writing. Look for any other bloggers who are publishing stuff in your area of interest. The best way to find these people is by searching for the right key words diligently on Technorati, blogger, Bloglines and Google, for instance. Once you’ve found these blogs, add a link on your blog. A good blogger always checks who’s linking to them and they’ll check you out. If they like you, they’ll reciprocate and you can share their audience.

7. Leave the legal department out of it
New York Blog-Queen BL Ochman has said that if every entry to the blog needs to be signed off by your legal department, you may as well forget the whole thing. I couldn’t agree more. Knowing how hard it is to get any copy approved by the lawyers, it would be deranged to submit a blog to the same process.

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