BtoB Blogging: Three Tips on How to Do It Right

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May 2009, Issue 63

Social Media
BtoB Blogging: Three Tips on How to Do It Right
By John Farrell, community correspondent for Healthcare Goes Mobile and Editor, Mobile Health Watch

How to Benefit from Your Blog Without Losing Credibility

As a journalist-turned-blogger, I've been steeped in the blogosphere for some time now, but it wasn't until a recent conference that I was given the valuable opportunity to articulate some "do's and don'ts" about how to make a BtoB blog successful. Below are three tried-and-true tips for launching and maintaining your corporate blog.

From Journalist to Blogger

I worked as a business journalist, freelance copywriter and media consultant for 15 years—specializing in the healthcare, technology and financial industries—before anyone approached me with an offer to publish my own blog. MedTech Publishing, the parent company of Healthcare IT News, was familiar with my work as a BtoB journalist in the healthcare and technology fields, so they invited me to help launch MobileHealthWatch.com, an online sister publication that would focus exclusively on mobile data technologies used by clinicians in healthcare settings.

After spending about a year developing daily aggregated news content and writing weekly blog posts for MobileHealthWatch.com, I was invited to also serve as a regular blogger and news correspondent for HealthcareGoesMobile.com, a site sponsored by Intel that focuses exclusively on the mobile point of care. But where Mobile Health Watch sought to connect health IT professionals across six content channels—Wireless Solutions, RTLS, Mobile Communications, Patient Monitoring, Security, Devices & Hardware—Healthcare Goes Mobile was looking to develop a new, virtual community focused on the unique interests of healthcare providers, IT professionals and hospital administrators.

Initially, I thought the work would more or less mirror my duties with Mobile Health Watch, but as I soon learned: while the underlying focal point may be similar and the audiences may cross over to some extent, every blog-driven Web site is unique unto itself. Their growth is organic and the work required to maintain them demands individualized attention because of those unique, subtle differences.

It wasn’t until I attended HIMSS09 (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Conference and Exhibition) on behalf of Intel that I was given the opportunity to articulate just what it takes to create and maintain a blog for the healthcare IT industry, and to offer some recommendations for companies that are considering a similar initiative.

Tip #1: Build Trust and Credibility

While participating in a "Meet the Bloggers" roundtable discussion, I hit on the fact that the first thing an organization looking to publish a blog should consider is the distinction between blogging for fun and blogging for profit. Most companies consider adding a blog to their Web site because they believe it will be a great marketing tool. It can be—but if positioned as such, it's almost certainly doomed to failure. Blogging for profit means delivering on an implicit promise of timely, accurate information. To stray from this promise is to compromise your blog’s credibility. Credibility is trust. Trusting in the value of your blog as an information source is what allows your readership to take root and grow. Incorporating a thinly veiled sales pitch in your blog posts will rile and alienate your readers, so avoid the temptation.

Tip #2: Make a Time Investment

Probably the biggest consideration when launching a blog is determining how much time you're able and willing to devote to content development. It's easy to become wrapped up in the pre-launch excitement, but once born, your blog—and its readership—will expect to be fed on a very regular schedule. Many blogs have fallen by the wayside because their bloggers underestimated the amount of time it would take to maintain them. And readers simply won't waste their time on a blog that fails to deliver useful information on a consistent basis. Investing time up front to map out a realistic schedule is mission critical. For example, MobileHealthWatch.com re-launched last month on April 27. Based on reader feedback, MedTech, my publisher, opted to drop the aggregated news content and to increase my blog entries from weekly to daily posts. But dropping the news feeds alone wouldn't provide me enough time to create fresh content on a daily basis, so we increased the number of hours per week that I would commit to the project in order to meet reader expectations. I also agreed to play a more active role in driving forum discussions, engaging readers in hot-button issues through poll questions and forum discussions, and responding to reader e-mails.

Tip #3: Leverage Other Social Media Outlets

Another key point to come out of the roundtable discussion—something all of us health IT bloggers were in agreement on—is the need to tap into social media sites and tools in order to market our blogs. In the case of HealthcareGoesMobile.com, for example—where my specific mission is to grow a virtual community among healthcare providers, IT professionals and hospital administrators—I could not do my job without incorporating Twitter and LinkedIn.

Every time I post a new blog entry, I tweet my Twitter community to alert them to the new content. Then I post what I've dubbed a "call-to-arms question" for my LinkedIn community, which both alerts them to the new blog post and solicits feedback in the form of a reader comment or opinion. Since my HealthcareGoesMobile.com blog posts generally include three or four questions arising from the post topic, I offer my readers multiple points of entry from which to engage. This kind of interactivity helps foster the sense of community we're shooting for, which is evidenced by our growing membership numbers.

Ultimately, there are many strategies for launching, developing and maintaining a successful BtoB blog, but incorporating these basic building blocks will go a long way toward achieving your goals. Good luck!

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John Farrell is the community correspondent for Healthcare Goes Mobile and editor of Mobile Health Watch. He can be reached at jfarrell@medtechpublishing.com.

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