Category Archives: Corporate Blogging

I’m happy to report that Kellblog was featured prominently in a story yesterday on Business Insider entitled How To Make An Awesome Corporate Blog.

I provided the first tip: throw “corporate” out the window.

That’s because,definitionally, I don’t think there are great corporate blogs. There are only great corporate bloggers.

• If you really want a “corporate” blog, try a “news and events” RSS feed instead. It will be less work and more directly meet the information need.

• If you want a ghost-written CEO blog, stop. It won’t work. Give it up. (And read this post for more.)

• If you want coverage in the blogosphere, appoint smart people to engage with existing blogs/bloggers by commenting.

• If you really want your message, or some aspects of it, out through blogging, then find one or more people in the organization with the skill, time, and desire to write a blog that will indirectly benefit the company. For example, Timo Elliott at SAP writes such a blog, BI Questions.

The complete tip list is:

• Throw corporate out the window
• Who should write the blog? Everyone
• Your content should go beyond your business. (I get cited here as well.)
• A blog is not about marketing (but good ones can end up doing just that)
• More content guidelines
• Get personal
• Encourage customer interaction
• If you can’t do these points, then don’t have one
• Awesome blogs to check out

I get another nice excerpt in the middle.

Whatever you do, your blog should not be “an advertisement for the company or a regurgitation of company news and press releases,” Kellogg warns.

The full story is here. For those really interested in corporate blogging, you should check out what Debbie Weil has to say on the subject.

I just received a fun note from fellow blogger Daniel Tunkelang of The Noisy Channel who pointed out that Pufip has calculated the worth of my blog as $394,545,921 so I should be retiring in the next week or so.

Or perhaps, not. As I’m sure Daniel is aware, Pufip only works for top-level domain names so sadly, I think the $395M value is Blogspot’s and not mine. (And even then, it strikes me as way high.)

One of the disadvantages of hosting my blog at Blogspot is that I lose such analytics. But at this point, I actually feel rather trapped because I worry that changing the domain name would be a lot of work, break a lot of links, and cause me to lose my PageRank. I like Blogger, by the way, as a blog-creating tool, and Blogger does let you host your blog at your own domain. I’ve just defaulted into hosting it (for free, I might add) at Blogspot.

So, I’ll see you in the office tomorrow. I think Daniel will be back in his office, too — while his blog is worth a respectable $58K, I don’t think he’ll be retiring to journalism anytime soon, either.

Hi Ho!

I’m excited to report that the Mark Logic CEO Blog was cited in CNBC’s Executive Careers blog in a recent post entitled Blogging and the CEO.

Excerpt:

Here’s a rundown of some of the best CEO blogs; take some inspiration from these visionary leaders if you’re thinking of starting your own executive-level blog.

They then go on to list the following folks/blogs as the ones to watch:

• Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems
• Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks
• Dave Kellogg, Me!
• Bill Marriott, Marriott
• Mike Critelli, Pitney Bowes

Here’s what they had to say about my blog:

Kellogg, CEO of startup Mark Logic (which is developing XML server) has been blogging since 2005 on everything from business plans to XML database development.

Posting frequency: At least once every business day, usually by 8:30 am Pacific time; sometimes Kellogg posts two or three posts over the course of the day.

Bonus: If you’re a tech exec interested in database development, this blog is chock-a-block with info on the latest developments search paradigms.

Thank you! This kind of recognition helps make the midnight posts worthwhile.