How to Start a Business Blog, Part 3: Choosing Authors

This is part 3 of a new series on how to start a business blog, and is aimed at businesses of all sizes. In these articles, I’m going to address business-specific concerns and requirements for business blogging. Previously: How to Start a Business Blog, Part 2

Step 4: Determine who the Authors of your Business Blog will be
With personal blogs, an author can choose to go it alone or join with others as a group blog. The choice is up to the author. With business blogs, there are also many possibilities, ranging from a single author to a team. Business bloggers are not necessarily company employees, who often already have plenty to do without adding blogging responsibilities. Below is a list of some business blog authorship possibilities:
• Single company person, who becomes the public voice of the company. This person must be chosen with care, as they will become the spokesperson for the company. Choose someone who is a people person, who is articulate, and who can act as a bridge between customers and the company. This person can be a company leader (such as GM’s Bob Lutz) or a more front line individual (such as Robert Scoble was for many years at Microsoft).
• Multiple company employees, who share a common general company blog or who can author multiple company blogs according to the company’s different service and product groups.
• Ghostwriters, who do not work for the company, but blog for the company on the company’s blog. The word ghostwriter can have negative connotations for some people, but there are many professional ghostwriters who do excellent work. There is nothing wrong with hiring ghostwriters to help busy high-level executives blog. You don’t have to hide it, but you don’t have to draw undue attention to it, either. A plain-language disclaimer page is all that’s needed. The whole point behind ghostwriters is that they don’t take direct credit and are unknown.
Which option is best depends on the size of your company and whether or not company people have the skills or time to blog. There’s no reason why the second and third options couldn’t both be employed. You can always begin with just one person and grow from there as needed.
Choose the Willing
Only choose people who are already blogging on their own or who really want to do it. The unwilling and skeptical will make for lousy bloggers, and will harm the company’s image, not enhance it.
Get Samples
Ask for writing samples from your prospective bloggers. This applies to employees just as much as it does to ghostwriters. Don’t choose someone who sounds like a commercial or a lawyer. Choose someone who sounds like they’re carrying on a conversation with another human being, like they’re just being neighborly.
Updates to This Post
Chris Garret has a great post about Freelance Blogging that is very helpful not just to bloggers, but also to business decision-makers attempting to judge whether or not to hire ghostwriters or bloggers from outside the company to blog on the company blog.