Breaking out of the CEO Box

The obvious first step in starting a business blog is determining your editorial focus. Many businesses start with the idea that the CEO or another prominent member of the team should blog about the company’s products and services. This is a good idea for some companies. Just look how well GM has done with its FastLane Blog.

But for some companies, the editorial focus isn’t quite so obvious. For GM to have a top level executive blogging about its cars is a no-brainer. Their mission is pure and simple: get the public interested in buying GM vehicles. But what about when the focus isn’t so clear?

All the buzz about the Hotel Chelsea today got me thinking about the second kind of business blogging strategy: the audience-oriented editorial focus. As I wrote, even though the Living with Legends blog isn’t officially involved with the management of the Chelsea, it’s editorial overlap with the interests of the average Chelsea guest is ideal. The result is a marketing strategy that couldn’t have been better if Hotel Chelsea owner/manager Stanley Bard came up with it himself.

If you want to start a business blog, it’s possible that the CEO model could work for you, but we think that you’ll find much more compelling ideas if you step outside the box a little. You need look no further than Wells Fargo’s community-building blog Guided by History that covers the history of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 while helping San Franciscans prepare for the inevitable next big tremor.

As Jeremiah Owyang pointed out, Wells Fargo couldn’t blog about finance because the topic was so legally and politically fraught. So instead, they started with their audience and extrapolated an editorial focus based on their needs and interests. The goal of the blog is to get potential customers to think of Wells Fargo as their community bank, a leader that cares about San Francisco’s past, present, and future. We think they’ve accomplished it.

Another way to do this is to sponsor a blog written by a third party. This situation is ideal for Connexion by Boeing. They pay us to write a blog called inFlightHQ whose core audience - seasoned business travelers - overlaps nicely with Connexion’s primary customer base. We only very occasionally write anything directly about Connexion, but the blog still serves to extend their brand. inFlightHQ has become popular with the business travel set, and they know that they have Connexion to thank.

The bottom line: if you want to think outside the box when it comes to determining your blog’s editorial, stop thinking about the CEO and start thinking about your audience. It’s likely that you already know what your customers want to hear about. Blogging to capture that audience is a logical next step.