How to make employees blog?

This blog has completed 4 years on 22nd May 2010 and taking liberty to give some Gyan...

Many enterprises launch their corporate blog (internal or external) with enthusiasm and great expectations. But soon, generating quality content for the blog will become a challenge, as most of the employees do not care to spend some time and contribute quality article to the blog.

Those who’re responsible for the corporate blog often find it challenging to motivate employees to blog. How to make your staff get involved in company’s social media initiatives? Here are a few practical tips.

How to motivate employees to blog:
1 Start from top down. Encourage CEO and CXOs to blog first.
This will reinstate company’s faith in social media and encourage rest of the staff to get involved. Many of the employees, though willing to blog, hesitate to do so, thinking “My boss would feel I’m wasting time on blog”. When the encouragement comes from top, it works.

2 Get rid of their fears about blogging:
Many hesitate to blog thinking “What if I do a mistake?” “My English is not good” “Who will read what I write”, “I can’t write anything interesting”. These fears, even if true, can be eliminated only when he or she takes the plunge. So explaining how blogging can help them overcome these fears and improve their language and communication might convince them to start experimenting

3 Show them what all can be written
When someone is not a natural writer, he/she will not have an idea what all can be written. For example, a subject matter expert with few decades experience will be super rich with knowledge related to his field, but may need some handholding if he’s to put his wisdom into words.

Similarly an employee can write about his passion, experiences, fiction, poems, family celebrations, travelogues and so on. Demonstrating them how various happenings in life can be effectively shared via blog will make it easier for them to get started

4 Identify lead bloggers/champions in each department
Identify a few enthusiastic bloggers in each department who can motivate rest of the guys to blog. They can also help as mentors, clearing any doubts questions or technical difficulties other staff may face while blogging.

5 Incentives and Encouragement
When an employee spends quality time in contributing quality article for the blog, his efforts and contribution needs to be recognized appropriately. Appreciation could be as simple as featuring him/her prominently on the blog (say as blogger of the week) or some other financial and non financial incentives

This element is critical because quality of corporate blog will be diluted if time consuming high quality content is treated at par with another post sourced from an email forward

6 Get good readership at the blog
If there’re good number of readers visiting the blog and blog posts get good no of comments, quality writers will naturally be attracted to the blog. Securing good readership for corporate blog warrants another post on its own, but in brief, it can be achieved by planned promotions, effective corporate communication on blogs & its advantages, friendly design and quality contents.