For some time now the Official Google Blog has been widely recognised as the pinnacle of corporate blogging. It beat rival blogs O’Reilly Radar, Yahoo! Search and the TomPeters blog in Technorati's 2006 world rankings. In 2009 it's the only "corporate blog" to make the Times top 25 blogs. So, what makes it so dam good?The fundamental factor that makes the Official Google Blog successful is that Google's primary product is a complicated one which needs explaining....and that's precisely what the Google blog does.
It provides insightful, valuable and very usable content that almost everyone with a website would/should be interested in, and it keeps those who want to be "in the know" ahead of the curve, letting them know about Google's emerging services.
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So surprise surprise the success of the Official Google Blog is directly related to the services which Google provides, hmmm funny that.
One of the interesting things I've come across in the early stages of my research is that if a company's primary site is interactive, personalised and self explanatory e.g. Amazon, or Facebook then having a blog doesn't add much to the average users relationship with that site. However, a blog can add great value to a readers experience with a company, if that company's site is static, non interactive, and they have a complicated market offering.
Amazon is a great example of an interactive website which also has a blog, Josh Catone seems to think that the Amazon web services blog is pretty great because it uses a brilliant personal voice. But I would beg to differ, it's not the voice that really makes a blog worth reading, it's the value of the content to the reader, and to be perfectly honest Amazon's blog doesn't add a whole lot of value to the customer's experience. This is because the average Amazon experience is personalised, interactive and not overly complicated.
A quick reality check will reveal that very few people read a corporate blog for fun. A crucial insight which I've gained in the last week is that it seems most people will read a corporate blog to achieve something...it seems simple I know, but consider what this mean for companies?
It means if you're going to start a corporate blog, start by asking this question...who are our readers going to be and how does having a blog help them, how does it add value to their lives and experiences with us? If you nail that then you're on a path towards success.
