What makes a good corporate blog?

I've recently been doing some work for a number of clients looking at good and bad practice in corporate blogs. It seems that they've become de-rigeur for many organisations, but the quality is extremely variable. Specifically, I was asked to advise on the sorts of content and the authorship of a corporate blog.

There are no hard and fast rules, but this excellent post outlines some best practice. I've also noted some things that I've seen that seem to work:

• Real people writing. Identified with names and photos. As long as each has a distinct voice, and there aren't too many, I see no harm in having multiple authors.
• An insider's view. This is one area which few corporate blogs to well. Rather than just spout corporate comms messaging via another channel, use the blog to give a behind the scenes view. Who did you meet on the floor of the industry conference, what did customers say to you last week, how did you arrive at a certain decision? You could also add snippets of news that are too small for formal press releases, or perhaps additional information that did not make the main release but adds colour or insight. Obviously this needs to be tempered by what is commercially (or legally) sensitive, but interesting anecdotes make a blog different from the bland corporate channels.

An industry view. Rather than just talk about the things you and your companies are doing try and take a  wider view of the things important to all the industry.

With a corporate blog you are effectively disintermediating the media to reach your audience directly, which means you have to take on the journalist's role. That means being very clear of the audience you are trying to reach, and creating content that is above all interesting and exclusive! The trap, I believe, is to try and treat the corporate blog as if it were a old-style newsletter. Building a publishing schedule is fine, but it can force writers into rigid format -I need to write a customer story, or a product release or opinion piece for the blog. All these tend to be too long, to controlled and too corporate to work on a blog. The blog ends up just reproducing the sort of content that can be found elsewhere on the site.

Brands such as Sun and Cisco are rightly recognised for comprehensive and insightful blogs, although my personal view is that much of their interest and reputation derives from who is writing rather than what is written. Often it is smaller organisations that have the most interesting bloggers. People who are keen to make an impact with their views.

Two Harvard clients that I think have really interesting blogs are Arbor Networks and OpenPages. These guys use their blogs to air personal views, provide tidbits of information and enter into conversations that are perhaps only tangentally related to their business. They are interesting in their own right - and very readable.

So to condense my response to my clients into two words of advice - be interesting.