In my last post I discussed that what should one do in case they are finding it difficult to stumble across a good blog topic idea and today, while going through my feed reader, I came across this post from Laura Spencer which discusses that who should write for a business blog?

Laura gave four alternatives when it comes to blogging for business which are as follows -

1) The business owner.

2) The employees.

3) Freelance bloggers.

4) Canned blog posts.

She asked that if you are a business owner then which one will you select for your business blog? I’m a business blogger myself and I think it really depends on the size of the organization and honestly, it really doesn’t matter that who blogs on a business blog. Lets take various situations and lets find out what may be the best solution -

1) The business owner - I believe it makes sense that if you have a small business then the business owner should blog on the blog as they will be the best people to put across the ideology in front of the world through their blog. It will even display that how passionate you are about your business and that way the blog readers will be able to relate to you in a much better way.

2) Employees - However, if we take the example of large organizations where lot of teams are working on different projects then it’s best that their project leaders should blog. Even over here, the business owner can blog and according to me the best strategy is that if their is a mix of the bloggers. Although, there should be no direct posting abilities for the people and a dedicated person should appointed who should approve that what gets published on the blog and what doesn’t. In short their should be an editorial process. It really depends that if the business is ready to hire an editor for the same or the owner is ready to act as the editor.

If we take few examples - Microsoft has lot of product based blogs and generally the team working on that project blogs and the CEO doesn’t blog anything. Google is another example where the team blogs about the products and various other updates. Although, there are various other CEO Bloggers (check out this list of CEO Bloggers created by Mario Sundar) who maintain the blog of their company.

3) Freelance bloggers - If at all the CEO, Employees are not comfortable in writing blogs or rather are not in a position to invest too much time in blogging then the other aspect is to use Freelance bloggers. Now, I’m part of a similar blog i.e. CloudAve (I act as a freelance blogger over here, in fact the whole blog is run by freelancers with no intervention from Zoho). It really depends as this is one of the most trickiest of the lot as you really depend on an outsider to write about the blog posts which are prevailing in your company.

This can be difficult as every person has a different perspective and it may be that the blogger who may be writing for your blog doesn’t have the same ideology as yours and thus it can create the conflict. So, the best approach in this kind of situation may be that clear instructions and terms and conditions should be set before you hire some outsider to write for your business.

4) Canned posts - This is what Laura has explained about canned posts -

Companies that specialize in creating generic blog posts that can be customized to your company’s specific needs are spring up.

Frankly I was not aware of these kind of practices and I will always refrain from such a practice and thus won’t love to make a comment on it either. It just doesn’t sound right to me at all.

In reality I believe it really doesn’t matter as it depends on the individual and apart from everything else, one should keep all the situations in mind before deciding that who should blog for the business, however only one thing should be kept in mind and that is what’s best for the business and I think all the answers will be clear as water.