B2B content normally sterilizes the human experience. When you liberate employees to write what they care about, the content can build your brand. Aytekin, it’s a waste of their time – programmers should program and designers should design. If you ask, who’s going to take up the challenge of blogging anyway? Here’s what worked: Ask people to brainstorm ideas from their day-to-day experiences. Often, you can’t implement the tips without buying the company’s product. If you encourage four employees to write blog posts by a particular deadline, one person is going to do it. If you want six blog posts, bring it up to 24 people. Personally, I want to learn what the world’s most talented people know. Spare a bored marketer, and let all of your employees share their passion.
B2B marketing writers are not boring — they are bored. In the rat race for SEO, clicks and visibility, they’re pressured to write at a relentless pace. Consequently, they sacrifice clarity to jargon, experience to corporate-speak, the personal for the impersonal. In most cases, they don’t even put a name on the byline. Most B2B content out there is “Nothing” by No One.
Not surprisingly, marketers struggle to capture the passion, expertise, and experiences of their organization. The alternative is to mobilize your entire team — engineers, designers, HR, salespeople, and marketers — into an army of bloggers.
B2B content normally sterilizes the human experience. Companywide blogging restores it. When you liberate employees to write what they care about, the content can build your brand. Excited people tend to write exciting stuff.
That’s what I discovered at my company JotForm. 10 years ago, I started blogging. Whether I attracted readers or not, writing was intrinsically valuable. The blog became a place to untangle ideas. It was the mental equivalent of putting data into a graph. When I took the unstructured information from my brain and organized it in a meaningful form, I discovered its real essence. You don’t really know what you know until you attempt to communicate it.
You could come up with dozens of reasons why I shouldn’t ask my team members to blog. Aytekin, it’s a waste of their time – programmers should program and designers should design. Aytekin, who wants to read long blog posts these days? Aytekin, why not just keep that stream of mini-posts rolling through your Facebook and Twitter feeds? If you ask, who’s going to take…
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