Level 3: How We Took the “Blah” Out of Corporate Blogging — Live from BlogWell

Coverage of this session by DGdesign’s Danielle Glick. Connect with her by following her on Twitter at @SocialMediaDFW and at @Dallas_Foodie.

4:30 — SocialMedia.org’s Erin McDaniel introduces Level 3‘s Digital & Social Media Manager, Ben Bacon.

4:31 – Ben: This presentation is for B2B companies, people new to starting a blog, or those who are new to social media.

4:32 – Ben: A year ago Level 3 had no social media channels. When people Googled “Level 3” they got level 3 sex offender results. This wasn’t good for our company!

4:34 – Ben: First we asked ourselves, “What are we going to talk about, what tone are we going to use, and how are we going to say it?”

4:35 – Ben: Step 1: You have to think about your business and how you compete. We work with big brands, Internet access, VPNs, phone service companies, B2B Telecom, and the royal wedding.

4:36 – Ben: We are winning deals because we are creating a more intimate customer experience. We are more personal, more approachable. “It’s not your job to figure out how to work with us, it’s our job to figure out how to work with your company.”

4:37 – Ben: We sell to people in IT organizations, like network engineers, telecom managers, solution architects. These people are “a little bit different.”

4:38 – Ben: We follow people on Twitter with the job titles that we are targeting. We learned that these people are super-opinionated about how they do what they do at work. These people are good BS-detectors. This knowledge is a good roadmap for what tone to use and what content to create for this target audience.

4:39 – Ben: When choosing who will blog for your company, search for storytellers, not job titles. Look for people who write long, articulate emails and tell great stories at happy hours, or people talk to customers the most and do what the customers do more than anyone else at your company.

4:39 – Ben: Train and empower these storytellers to blog. Send them articles about best practices and good and bad example blogs from other companies.

4:40 – Ben: Tips: Avoid brochure-speak or “adjective vomit.” Read it out loud; if it sounds funny, it’s not right.

4:41 – Ben: Analogies work really well with a very technical audience. It helps them understand the concept and to frame up these concepts to other non-technical people, like for their boss who makes the purchasing decisions.

4:42 – Ben: Engineers like to write about what they know, like product features. Instead, blog about big news that is affecting everyone, then tie it back to what you do. This casts a bigger net of interest.

4:43 – Ben: Do group posts. Send out a question to your blogger pool and you’ll get different responses. Combine these into one blog and this will showcase your company’s diverse thinking and talent.

4:44 – Ben: “Look in the mirror posts”—how are we going to be really transparent, what have we done wrong, and how can we share these learnings with customers in our blog?

4:45 – Ben: Talk about the taboo: death, taxes… and fiber cuts. A single blog tweet got picked up by Telecom News and got them lots of hits. “The 10 Most Bizarre and Annoying Causes of Fiber Cuts”— number 1 reason was squirrels. People loved this, and it showed that not all outages are their fault.

4:47 – Ben: Once you have fun with the blog, it spreads across social media. Examples: we tweeted geeky blog stickers on employees’ cars, asked if anyone was going as cloud computing for Halloween and someone read the tweet and actually made the costume.

4:49 – Ben: Results: Blog had 100K page views by the third month. We gained readers from 178 countries. On YouTube we became the #1 organic result for “data center networking.” On Twitter we went from 0-8K followers and our Klout score went from 0 to 50+. Our Google results improved too.

4:50 – Ben: Takeaways: Send monthly recaps in the form of a blog. He is not a fan of editorial calendars because he feels it zaps the juice out of topics. Find self-motivated bloggers.

Q&A:

Q: Can you share more about how you got buy-in from employees and their bosses? Their bosses will want them to stay doing their official jobs, not blogging.

A: Ben: It gets old when you have to track people down to turn in their blog post, so they try to use people who really want to write the blogs. Maybe they want to move up in their careers. They have about 20 bloggers who write one blog per month each. To convince the bosses, they use the results they got on Google and other social channels. Having some early wins with getting picked up in PR provides the proof that good things happen if they keep people blogging.

Q: Was it tough to get the buy-in to write with a friendly tone? What did you do to get over that? Also, what platform do you blog on?

A: Ben: We did one blog in 2 formats. One version was straightforward. The other was more fun and customer friendly. The latter got double the hits, so we knew this was the style we needed to use. We use the WordPress platform. We started with Worpdress.com and then once our IT department got involved, we were able to move it over to our own domain. He thinks you should start blogging even if your IT isn’t ready to help you set it up.

Q: How do you prevent issues?

A: Ben: Early on, everyone wanted to blog. He submits every post to one lawyer before he posts to make sure there are no intellectual property issues, etc.

Q: What was your business goal?

A: Ben: Brand awareness. We are very mindful of measuring with Google analytics and the keywords getting people to their site. We make sure to align these keywords with the things we are selling. We also use Klout topics to check if they are on-target.

Q: How did you decide to do blogs versus other channels? Why not something else? What are you going to do next?

A: Ben: We wanted to humanize the company and do that on our own property (web site) instead of Facebook or Twitter. We still use these other channels to promote the blogs though. We are only 7 months in. Step 1 was building an audience. Step 2 is getting more sophisticated with tying it into campaigns. We are still working on step 2 for 2012.

Q: Can you describe what your most recent position was before you became a blog manager?

A: Ben: “I was the stupid one who signed up to do it.” He was in product marketing and other forms of marketing before doing social media marketing. He was meeting with customers on the road in his previous job. He sees social media as the future, so he wanted to figure it out to round out his marketing skillset.