Business Blog Wire put up a terrific collaborative post listing 100 ways to utterly ruin your corporate blog. Go see the original post for the complete list but here are my favorites:
1 – Don’t allow your visitors to leave feedback of any kind – after all, you wouldn’t want them making fun of you; you had enough of that in high school!
4 – Keep your blog invisible by refusing to provide a link to it from your vintage-1997 corporate website.
9 – Don’t offer any feeds for your blog. Who needs feeds anyway? They’re just a passing fad – pretty much like your blog, right?
12 – Preach to them and judge them as much as your vocabulary permits. Let them know how superior you are and what lousy mortals they are for not being in your kind of position.
20 – Don’t respond to comments. Assume that people who leave comments on your blog have nothing better to do in life and hence don’t deserve any kind of input from you.
21 – Plagiarism, smagiarism. Why come up with your own content? After all, that’s what copy/paste is for!
28 – Don’t provide links to your archives, or only show past entries by date. Don’t use keywords, categories, or tags. Don’t provide a way to search past entries.
30 – Don’t respond to criticism or recent controversy about your corporation. Your blog is a happy, fun place. If you don’t mention negativity, people will just forget about it.
32 – Talk behind your bosses and colleagues. Post pictures of your colleagues picking their noses.
34 – Don’t read other relevant blogs for the industry you work for. Who cares about what they think?
55 – Insult a majority of your audience based on sex, religion, ethnic background, intellegence – the choice is yours and you can combine for bonus offence.
58 – Make it compulsory to sign up to be able even to read the posts on the blog.
63 – Don’t have your CEO post because he/she’s too busy counting his million-dollar salary.
71 – Talk down to readers in subtle ways so they really see you as expert — BTW the definition of expert is: X (the unknown in algebra) + spurt (a drip under pressure).
75 – Learn ‘em on your site … but don’t ever really listen to ‘em — it’s far safer that way.
77 – Run from insights and ideas that come from others in your field — new ideals will only confuse your goals.
86 – You don’t want to disturb your CEO or other important people in the company by getting them to blog, it is really more the Intern / Work Experience Guy’s job. Hell, even the Janitor will do.
88 – Get really mad when the Intern / Work Experience Guy / Janitor you made to blog because you couldn’t be bothered to, has written about how you couldn’t be bothered to blog. Who does he think he is?
89 – Actually you aren’t that mad – only a complete geek would read other blogs. So you have no idea what the blogosphere is saying about your company. Yours is the only blog worth caring about. And you pay the Intern / Work Experience / Janitor to care about yours.
91 – Over-optimise your posts – a keyword-optimised phrase should be keyword attractive to Search Engines but non-keyword-optimised human readers also love to wade through keyword-rich phrases with too many keywords which make no sense. (cf. keyword phrases).
97 – Try to calculate the Blog’s ROI – not a bad idea, per se, but once you have gathered everyone’s opinion on how to do it and got stuck into the calculations, you will find that you have no time left to post anything of value.
99 – Make sure your Domain name can be misread: ‘Experts Exchange’ may be the name of your blog but you could find that a domain name of http://www.expertsexchange.cc/ attracts clients looking for a very different type of service.
The contributors to the full list were Easton Ellsworth, Amrit Hallan, Jessica Neuman Beck, Colbert Low, Ed Lee, Greg Kiernan, Maria Palma, Ellen Weber, Alex Pullin, Mark White and they used Writely to collaboratively build the list – (which we love).
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
It was fun times, Shannon. I’m tempted to try something similar in the future. Thanks for telling us some of your favorites.
I agree with Easton, it was a good exercise in group blogging that also turned out to be fun times. And i am sure we could have come up with many more reasons given the chance and there would always be industry specific errors that could be damaging in their own special way
PS thanks for the link
Thanks Shannon! This is a really good link with some relevant and funny advice. My big one on this list is not providing contact information on your blog. You want to be transparent, but heck, you don’t actually want to interact with people