The blog is our #1 recruitment tool, accounts for a significant amount of our inbound services sales activity, 100% of our product inbounds (we're saturated now), and probably more than 50% of our press activity.
Everyone in the company writes. We run the site loosely like a "real" publication, with an editorial calendar. We have a few semi-effective management tricks for keeping posts on schedule.
In the future, the blog is going to account for 100% of our open source software releases (I'm releasing something significant on it next week), and an increasing amount of our research work --- we're going to publish more things on the blog, rather than waiting for events like Black Hat.
The big difference between our blog and corporate blogs is that we write about our space, the technology we work with, and the news in our industry, but almost never about the company itself.
We generally have the rule that as authors we write the blog for ourselves first - then we either keep it internal or publish it externally.
It's actually a great documentation tool and really helps record and solidify thinking that you might never get down on paper - particularly when we're dealing with topics that would not usually be documented via the usual processes (e.g. non-technical).
No. We fell completely ass backwards into it. I had a little blog in 2004; towards the middle of 2005, we felt like we had crappy marketing, sales, and outreach. We wrote a marketing plan with 3 major prongs --- Google ads, having everyone start writing for the blog, and I forget the third thing. The only thing that worked was the blog.
Everyone in the company writes. We run the site loosely like a "real" publication, with an editorial calendar. We have a few semi-effective management tricks for keeping posts on schedule.
In the future, the blog is going to account for 100% of our open source software releases (I'm releasing something significant on it next week), and an increasing amount of our research work --- we're going to publish more things on the blog, rather than waiting for events like Black Hat.
The big difference between our blog and corporate blogs is that we write about our space, the technology we work with, and the news in our industry, but almost never about the company itself.