Starting your b2blog - choices, choices, ...

So you decided to start a b2blog. Take a moment of reflection to decide a few important parameters of your blog:

1. Think who you will be blogging for? Your customers, your employees, your industry? But beware! Blogs are not surgical market instruments
2. Define the scope of your blog: this can be your organisation, market, industry, a project, … The scope can be either broad or narrow, and can evolve over time.
3. Find (a) good blogger(s): one or more individuals with both knowledge and writing skills to animate your blog
4. Decide frequency of updates: blogs are typically updated daily, but can you maintain this rythm? Frequent posting buries premium content, but gives the impression of a lively blog, and induces recurring visits. I suggest you start low (1-3 posts /week), giving each post a few days of exposure. You can always increase, in phase with your growing readership.
5. Decide user interaction: Can users post? Can they comment? Do you allow anonymous users to contribute? (beware of comment spam!), or only registered users? You need to think about the hierarchy of users and moderators, and preferrably qualify users before allowing them more privileges.
6. Your feedback to users: some blogs allow users to vote on comment. Some include hit counters per post, with lists of popular content. Also, a tagcloud can help users understand what your blog is about.
7. Define a blog policy, and publish it: this is your contract with your readers, and also your defense against abusive comments.
8. Select a blogging platform: there are many good systems available, e.g. Typepad, Moveable Type, Wordpress. Some content management systems, such as drupal, also allow blogs.
9. Check how your blog project integrates in your website, and other marketing communications.

But don’t overdo it! Take a few days or weeks to reflect on above. But don’t set up a corporate review committee, which would go quite against the spirit of blogging. And remember, the only way to learn blogging is by doing it.