Commerce Kitchen has been working hard to get our entire staff to blog. As you’ve probably noticed, the marketing team does a lot of blogging. Leslie, Jen, and I try to blog at least once a week, and we ask everyone else in the organization to blog once a month.
Here are three reasons why everyone in your organization should be blogging.
Many Voices Make a Rainbow
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No one says that, right? “Many voices make a rainbow.” I like to mix metaphors. That’s part of my voice.
When one person or one team blogs, their blogs are going to begin to sound the same. For instance, my blogs are always a mix of personal anecdotes and soundbytes of advice. That’s fine, sure, but it’s nice to read someone else’s perspective.
Some people may be more interested in delving into technical details, telling vivid stories, posting instructions, or simply recounting an event they attended. Great. Variety adds color, makes the blog more interesting, and gives your blog a wider appeal.
Expertise in the Blog Should Reflect Expertise in the Organization
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Commerce Kitchen’s main type of work is software development. However, if just Jen, Leslie, and I were to blog you’d think we were entirely a marketing agency. Yes, we understand the value of blogs from a marketing perspective more than our software developers do, and we’ll do whatever it takes to have an active online presence.
But we need our developers’ expertise. We need to feature their quirky thoughts, their freakish intelligence, and all the fantastic knowledge they gain and concepts they invent every day while coding, scoping, planning projects, QAing, and all the other programmy things they do.
Without Aaron’s knowledge of Sass, Alex’s expertise on web image formats, Eric’s passion for e-commerce, Tynan’s business knowledge, Michelle’s culture ideas, Russ’ advice on coding, and all the other insightful words coming from the rest of the staff, our blog would be pretty boring, even for me.
Your Staff’s Social Networks Bring You Traffic
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The final reason you should have everyone blog is that most people, after spending an hour or two writing something, want to share what they’ve written with their friends.
They’ll hopefully post a link to the blog on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and their friends and great-aunt Margaret will all go to your website to read the blog.
I’m not saying that great-aunt Margaret will end up being a client of yours, but she may know the owner of a hotel chain in Michigan who needs a new app, and she’ll refer them on to you.
Likewise, your hiring pipeline will grow as more people begin following your blog. For us, we love to hire people that our devs recommend. We know that if they think they’re good, then we’ll think they’re good as well.
Your staff’s friends and acquaintances may end up being your future employees.
Not everyone is a good writer, and this is often an argument you’ll hear when trying to wrangle more people to write (especially the more technical members of your staff). But you most certainly have at least one person working for you who is a good writer and a good editor, and he or she can help make blog posts readable.
If you continue to hear grumbles, or if your staff is having trouble with it, then refer them to Jen’s post on writing a blog post in an hour.
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