Karen Wickre is a long-time business communicator, wordsmith & media specialist. Karen grew up in Washington D.C. She has worked for a variety of media and/or branding companies, including Siegel & Gale, Upside Media; the gaming company, 3DO, and of course, Google.
Karen has worked at Google since 2002, specializing in business writing and media relations. Karen first launched Google’s corporate blog back in 2004. Today the company has digital embassies for virtually every product. This armada spans dozens of blogs, Twitter profiles, YouTube and more recently, Facebook. She also developed Google’s corporate strategy using Twitter in 2009; in the first six months, @Google gained more than 2 million followers, making it one of the largest corporate Twitter accounts.
We were able to ask Karen a few key questions about business blogging as preview ahead of her participation at Connected Marketing Week:
What is the most important thing a company new to blogging should do?
Read other business, news, corporate blogs to get a feel for all that’s possible. Some are personal (ie an executive writes it), some are collaborative. Some blogs are all about ‘thought leadership’ and others are more about customer service and best practices. The main thing to do is get familiar with a wide variety (there is no single right way to do this), and begin to consider what *you* would want to say.
What questions do good business blog posts answer?
Posts don’t literally answer questions so much as establish ground for the company. Do most posts offer useful or unique information? Do they reflect the company’s values and interests? Do they demonstrate the people behind the company/products? Collectively, these are the things a good company blog should do.
