Max Goldman was hired with a primary objective to develop a blog to help promote the enterprise software company Success Factors. We thought we’d ask him about the joys and pains of being a corporate blogger.
So Max, how did you get here?
I had done a little blogging before and that was enough to get called in for an interview. The company was smart enough to know that blogging was an important communications mechanism – still quite visionary for a corporation, I think – and knew it had to get involved, but wasn’t sure exactly how to attack the opportunity. If you look at the original job description, they wanted someone with a journalism degree but no one they found was technically savvy enough to fit the rest of the role. Coming from an entrepreneurial background, I think I was the right guy to take on the unstructured job of figuring out exactly how to leverage blogging to help create a conversation with our customers and prospects.
The job also encompasses some other community-related areas. My next project is building a customer forum where we can service our customers online and provide them with additional resources to service themselves as well as give them ways to communicate with each other. When you are in a subscription business, as we are, you have to constantly make sure your customers are getting everything they need to succeed or else you get “fired” pretty quickly. Communities like the blog can help reinforce that relationship.
What’s the aim of the blog? How do you create the right tone?
The goal of the blog is to talk WITH our customers and other people in our industry, instead of AT them as is sometimes the case with traditional marketing. We’ve got a whole organization of experts in our company and they’ve got a lot of knowledge to share. We can help educate and further the industry and at the same time, show people that we’re not just trying to sell them some software – we really know what we’re talking about and we can help them accomplish their own goals. Another aim is to hear what other people in our industry have to say. We don’t exist in our own little SuccessFactors bubble. We have an obligation to our customers to hear what’s on their minds and incorporate it into our own thinking.
The tone aspect is difficult, and is still evolving. There’s a desire to make things entertaining but also relevant; timely and topical but also important. We recognize that a professional’s discretionary time is limited, and we try to respect that by only talking about things we think are worthwhile. That said, no one’s going to read it if it’s important and boring. So I’m always thinking about that.
HR staff aren’t my first choice for a blog reading target market. Are your customers listening? Are the talking back?
There are some very forward thinking HR people, and there are some that are further behind on the blogging curve. But there is a tendency among bloggers to think that they’ve got something better than sliced bread. A blog is just a website with some two-way features – people get that once they are exposed to it. To the extent that people don’t “understand” blogs, it’s because we make the idea more complicated than it really is. The other part of that is that a reader of mine may be an HR practitioner at work, but a gadget geek (or a trend watcher) at home. Work blogs are entering the mainstream consciousness on the coattails of things that interest people in their personal lives. Nevertheless, for this to be successful, we are going to have to continue to educate our customers and prospects about what we’re doing and work to get them involved. But it’s already happening. For sure.
What do you do to develop your network amongst bloggers?
This is definitely an aspect of the blog that I’m still strategizing about. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the universe of related blogs is quite small. There are maybe 30 HR related blogs of any quality out there and of those, maybe 5 are directly relevant, so the opportunities to network are few, at least right now. The second reason is that I’ve been very focused on content. I don’t come from an HR background and part of making this blog successful will be making sure the content is compelling and on target. People know a ruse when they see one and I want to make sure I am perceived as the real thing. I am working to educate myself as much as possible and learn what I as a precursor to getting involved hardcore. That said, I have begun to link and comment more and more as I find things I can speak to.
What difficulties do you encounter with internal culture of SuccessFactors? How do you work to over come this?
The truth is that the difficulties are few and far between. There is some work involved in educating my colleagues about the benefits of the blog and getting them to participate. But, by and large, people are excited about the potential and happy to let me run in exploring it. Right now I’m giving internal presentations to help evangelize the opportunity and conducting my own guerilla marketing campaign to get people involved.
There’s a lot of talk of transparency and open-ness with blogging – is this important to you?
This is tremendously important. After taking the job, I came across a comment someone had made to a post about the job description. They basically said that the blogger will be a marketing puppet and the blog will be of no value as a result. I am extremely conscious of this perception which I would wager is faced by any corporate blogger. I really believe that the ONLY value for this blog is if we can be an honest participant in the larger conversation. The risk of being manipulative is huge – not only for the blog, but for the company. Were people to believe that they were being fooled with, I think we’d lose customers or potential customers as a result. So there’s real downside potential. At the same time, there’s a huge upside in real business terms to being open and honest. We’re a first mover in this space and we have the opportunity to be a major player in the conversation if we play our cards right. If we can achieve that status, I think people will be exposed to us in a very positive light and it can be a significant competitive differentiator for us.
Blog – Marketing tool or reflection of the soul of an organization?
The honest to goodness truth is both. There is a real desire to show people what we’re about. There’s nothing to hide. We’re working hard because we believe we can help our customers improve their companies and do their jobs better – and we want everyone to know it. But, if we didn’t think there was a business benefit to it, you can be sure we wouldn’t be spending our time on the blog. We think that if we can show people how we think and what we think about they’ll be inclined to do business with us versus our competitors. We’re a long way from that level of impact, but we’re getting there.
What are your next steps and what are the biggest challenges for getting there?
There is a lot of tactical optimization going on right now. We’re sort of on v0.6 of the blog and it needs some work, technically, to make sure its where it needs to be. So that’s one thing. Marketing the blog is another. We’ve got a universe of people (both internal and external) who don’t even know that we’re doing this and that it’s a potential asset for them. So I’m working to spread the word. The third leg of the stool is content. Without it, the blog is a just a bad website. I’m working everyday to make sure all the relevant news and issues cross my desk so I can point them out and let people know where we stand.
Thank You.
Facebook
Twitter
Digg
Reddit
StumbleUpon
