Blogging and social media presences that sound like your corporate press release won’t work. Social media is where people talk to people, not to lifeless or unoriginal companies. At the same time, it doesn’t require a personality boot camp to get started — you already know how to talk like a real person.
What to do:
- Get out of the PR department. Try letting folks that haven’t been trained in press releases and marketing speak find your authentic voice.
- Respond instead of write. A lot of the pressure of social media comes from the idea that you have to create the new, hot stuff. Instead, find your voice through sharing your thoughts on others’ ideas.
- Talk about old stuff. Your content doesn’t have to be news to be authentic — it just has to be interesting.
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How would you convince recalcitrant management that a blog's voice can be looser than the general run of PR and HR produced copy? I write for our company's blog and as a result I read a lot of company's blogs and there seems to be a common pattern.
1. Blog starts out.
2. Blog content is flattened into merely marketing instead of a conversational voice.
3. Blog writer burns out on producing make-work corpspeak entries.
4. Blog sits inactive for months.
5. Occasional update every couple of months or so.
My suspicion isn't that there isn't enough time or material to write about, but that a heavy editorial hand limits how bloggers can keep the work interesting to themselves.