

Ask YC: How Serious Does Your Team Take Blogging? - iamdave

Had an opportunity to partner up with a more established company here in the community about a week ago, and backed out.  It's turning out for the better as we're learning a lot of things here in the office, thought we do miss having some resources to expedite some processes.  It's no big deal.<p>However, round table discussions it becomes painfully apparent the team all supported the same reason for backing out as I did: we didn't like their blog.<p>I had everyone go to the site, try to get a feel for this other company.  Look at their porfolio, and try to get a feel for the type of clients this partner works with.  Everyone came back and said the blog just didn't feel authentic.  It felt like they were trying to be niche bloggers and didn't actually try to communicate with people.  It was stale.  Contrast this to the other huge firms here in town who blog about just about anything, you can see there's a real sense of character emanating from these places (which says a lot considering one of the other companies is made up of 4 guys and a dog, yet they produce absolutely the best design work in the city, the other has repeatedly been considered the best marketing company in the south east).<p>This got me to thinking about something that was already troubling me: there are plenty of companies in my community that are on the web, but use their blogs as glorified event calendars.  Their entire archives are repeats of "Don't for get about this event, coming up on this date".  There's hardly any company philosophy or jovial conversation to the readers going on.  It's wasting valuable space and it's impacting the market when you see things like this.<p>My question to YC: How does your team approach blogging?  Is it a message board where you post ideas, and your fans communicate with you?  Is it an alert system where you only talk about software?  Or is it a calendar where all you do is say "Don't forget tomorrow is bagel day, come by and see us!"<p>Share with us your blogging philosophy.
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tptacek
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.

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DaniFong
Those are great rules.

Was Matasano arranged like this from the outset, or did you grow into it?

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tptacek
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.

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andyking
At our small local radio station (I know it's not YC, but I hope this is
vaguely relevant), the blog is pretty awful. It's simply an endless stream of
calls-to-action along the lines of "come to event X on Saturday", or "listen
to our new drive time host", or even "visit our sponsor, XYZ Ford on High
Street". It's quite possibly the bossiest blog I've ever come across, and
being the muppet who's ended up in charge of web stuff I write most of it! We
don't even have commenting turned on by order of management, "in case someone
was to post something offensive". In common with most things related to the
radio industry's fumbling forays into the online world, it's like something
from 1996. Accordingly, visitor numbers are through the floor.

Given a free rein to write what I wanted, I'd change the tone of the thing
completely. First, I'd start writing posts that really put across the
atmosphere of an exciting radio station full of creative people. I'd make
posts about funny or interesting things that had happened that day, guests
we'd had in the studio, events we'd reported from. I'd point readers to things
on the web that we'd liked and give them an insight into what it's like behind
the scenes.

Perhaps--shock horror--we might even write occasionally about things that
aren't work-related and are of interest to people outside our immediate
audience, in the same way as Pingdom, that uptime-monitoring firm that gets on
the social news sites every five minutes. Then I'd flip the commenting switch
and turn what is currently a fairly dull company mouthpiece into a
conversation, where listeners could tell us what they thought and communicate
with us and between themselves.

I might just do it and see what happens.

On a related note, the blog at <http://onegoldensquare.com/> makes for an
interesting read. It's from a British national radio station called Virgin
Radio, which is changing its name and programming. Rather than smothering
itself with the thick veil of confidentiality that usually surrounds the radio
industry when it does things like this, they've set up the blog with posts by
staff from the programme controller down about what they're doing and why
they're doing it, along with writing on all sorts of diverse subjects. It's a
refreshing change and well worth a quick look at as an example of a quality
company blog.

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DaniFong
I owe my cofounder relationship to my blog, and the idea for my company only
came to me after writing about what sort of thing I wanted to work on.

That said, it's not exactly a blog for the company. Our intentions are,
though, that as we build this thing (a compressed air powered scooter) we'll
post more and more that's of interest. We'll have a little photoblog, which I
think will give investors and readers and prospective engineers a window into
the operations of the company, and might build up some buzz. It's also a
soapbox, which I tend to enjoy. :-)

I put a ton of time into my blog though. About 1 - 2 days in the
writing/editing phase, and a pipeline for research and thinking and trying out
the ideas in conversation is weeks or months long.

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rjett
My startup is building our company around the blog: We have started to blog
each day about different things that career-minded college students might find
interesting. The writing has a Gawker-like flavor to it and the plan is to
build up some sort of loyal reader base so that when we release our app, we
will automatically have users.

Shameless self promotion here: <http://findthepulse.com/blog>

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dshah
The genesis of my startup, HubSpot, was the positive impact that blogging
could have on a small business.

Today, blogging is a critical component of our inbound marketing efforts.
That's how many of our potential customers hear about us, and it's what we use
to establish thought leadership in our industry

If you're working on a startup, my advice would be to skip the business plan
and go write a blog.

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curiousgeorge
If they can do everything you can do why are they talking to you?

