Finding a Company Voice

To start a corporate blog, you need to find a corporate voice. There’s just no way around it. The tone should be less formal than marketing language, but not as informal as your friend’s Live Journal. So how do you strike that balance? It’s a question I’ve wrestled with and worked with more than a few companies to try and answer, and the answer is different for each one. I’ve pulled together a few things that have helped me in this process.

• Do research into other blogs in your industry and beyond to get a better feel for the space

• Write at least 3 intro posts at varying tones and get people involved in this step, picking the right one for the blog

• Consider how you talk to an acquaintance who you don’t know very well; that’s a good guideline for the level of formality

• To keep blog entries consistent and avoid multiple editors pulling the blog in different directions, have one point person for the blog.

• Blogs can be easily changed in a matter of minutes. Consider the procedure to be to post and change if there’s a problem instead of letting each entry get into a long editing process.

The most important part of this process is to make a decision and stick with it, avoiding the paralyzing need to make it completely representative of the company and in ideal marketing language. Just remember, each blog entry is not a company press release and will not be viewed as such.

Corporate Blogging: The Cost to Create a Blog

Once the idea to have a corporate blog is discussed, one of the first questions will usually be about cost. The financial cost to set up the blog isn’t much, but the time and resources that need to be allocated for upkeep can add up. So, how can you manage the process?

A blog, by its nature, needs to be fed with new content on a fairly regular basis. This is what keeps readers and search engine spiders coming back. The most successful blogs have many entries a day, but they didn’t always start out that way and you don’t need to blog that often for it to have an impact. In general, more is better, but you don’t need to post more than once or twice a week to have a viable blog. Ideally, blogs that have one post per week should be updated on the same day every week so that readers know when to come back for new news.

This does not have to be as difficult of a task as it might sound. Keep in mind that blog entries do not have to be long or formal at all. It can be as little as a paragraph or as long as a page. In general, blog entries are around 300 words, although they can make an impact even if they are shorter. It does have to be more than just posting a link to an interesting site, but if you add a couple of sentences of insight about the link, you’re all set.

Once it has been decided how often to post, there are a number of things to take into consideration when figuring out how much time it will take to maintain. Time needs to be set aside for keeping up to date on company and industry news. There also must be resources allocated for writing posts and time for editing. Just keep in mind that the more steps the post has to go through, the more expensive the blog becomes, which is another reason that streamlining the publishing process is key.

After careful consideration and testing, here’s a run down on what seems to be the minimum blogging commitment needed for it to be a sustainable and worthwhile project.

• 200 words per entry

• 1 entry per week

• 8 hours per month

Obviously, anything above this is preferable and will get improved results.

Corporate Blogging: Building a Plan

When beginning a blog project, there are a few things that I always want to get figured out first. You might be in the same boat, so I’m going to walk through my process when starting to blog with a company. Hopefully what I have to say helps or perhaps you can offer some additional pointers.

Who

The truth of the matter is that the people who have the most industry insight and are the most qualified to be blogging for a company are usually the people who don’t have time to blog. There are a few ways to work around this. It can be in the first person of someone like the head of the company, but the first draft can be written by someone else. Then, it just needs to be edited and sent back for posting, greatly reducing the time requirement by the person whose voice it is in. Team blogging can be a solution, where different people have a specific day of the week to blog or one person that can do mini interviews of people who have good industry insight but very little free time. A blog put into the third person may not have an individual voice, but can still be informal and can be easier to manage since anyone can post and it will still flow together. Each company is different, so finding the blogging process that works best is a very individual decision. The most important part is to get started.

What

I always start out with a welcome blog entry that talks about what kinds of things readers can expect to find on the blog. While visitors might not be coming to the blog this early, it is a good first post to organize thoughts and create a kind of mission statement for the site. You can always write about something different but at least there is a direction. What industry expertise can you offer and what audience are you looking to attract?

When

Sometimes the question of when needs to be addressed. Usually the answer is as soon as everything’s ready. Once there’s a plan, a blog design, and a few opening posts, the blog is a go. However, there have been times when it is advantageous to wait to start the blog. For instance, if you want to have a lot of content to start out with, you can wait and draft more pieces so that the blog can start out on a more solid base.

Where

Each company has to come up with their own answer on where a blog is hosted. Some have it on a separate site and others want it in a subfolder of their site. When it comes right down to it, having it on the company site is probably best since posts will boost search results for the whole site and traffic is brought right to the company site instead of the blog and company site competing. Having a blog right on the site can be a great way to integrate this new medium and reach out to customers.

How

If putting the blog right on the company site, it can quickly be incorporated into the company plan. Consider making announcements on the blog and having promotions for loyal readers. The more that the blog is used as a platform for speaking to the public, the more of that public will be interested in it. Make sure that the rest of the company is aware of the blog and get everyone involved in brainstorming blogging topics and getting the people writing the blog the latest company information. If industry news is sent around the company, get this news on the blog as well as your thoughts on it. This level of cooperation is vital in creating a successful and representative blog.

New Feature Spotlight: The Form Builder

Frankly, this one has been a long time coming. We’ve been getting requests for a form construction toolkit since we launched Squarespace, and I can finally say we’ve got something in place that solves form construction issues for 99% of the situations we’ve seen out there.

Form construction toolkits on the web are nothing new. There are a variety of services out there in the $9-50/month price range that will let you get a reasonable form together and collect data from it. When selecting a service like that, in addition to the ridiculous added cost (some charge in terms of entries you can receive per month) — you’re faced with integrating that solution into your existing website and styling it to match the presence you’ve already designed. Not to mention the fact that you’ve got again another service to interface with and manage.

We intentionally designed our component to export to a Microsoft Excel file (and/or you can send submissions to an email address), which will allow you to analyze and record your data in a format that is more or less universally understood. This allows us to provide unlimited space in terms of data collection — as the excel file is quite small (even with a large amount of data). Besides, with a large amount of data, offline analysis tools are currently much faster and more powerful than anything provided on the web.

I’d like to take a moment and show some interface shots of how our new component looks operates.

First, find the form component in your page list from within Architecture and add it to your website:

You’ll notice in the configuration area you’ve got a number of methods to save data with your new form. You can save data to an Excel spreadsheet, which will get placed in General Storage:

You can also have your entries sent to your email address:

Additional options exist for setting form confirmation messages, and sending email receipts to individuals submitting form data.

After adding the form to your page, you can proceed with the configuration the same way you would any Squarespace component — right from the front of your site. Returning to your site will yield the form module without any fields added. Click “add a new field” to get started added field components.

There are many field types you can add to your new form that help validate input. You can add text fields, email fields, website fields, number fields, address fields, etc. etc. Select a field type and click “Create Field”.

In this example, we’ll first add a “Single Line Text” field to our form, which (surprise) lets users enter a single line of text into your form:

You can then adjust the field properties by clicking on the field, and entering default field values, changing the title for the field, or augmenting user instructions:

That’s just about it! You can keep adding more fields with the “add a new field” button, and configuring them right via the visual interface. To re-order fields, drag them and drop them in new locations. When you’re done, log out, and your form is ready to go — totally styled to the existing theme of your site. Everything is together and managed in one place:

The form component is the first of many coming to our business packages. We’ll be adding things like simple eCommerce components shortly which will allow you to build simple stores using just your PayPal account and Squarespace!

On Templates

Recently, a Squarespace customer asked : Why not have a range of widths for all your templates?

The answer is, most of them do have a range of widths! Just navigate to the Style Settings of your custom style manager.

When it was first released, Squarespace did not have the capability of allowing users to change the widths of their layouts without some complicated revisions to their Custom CSS (and sometimes graphical changes.)

Now that we have this capability, we’ve been creating new templates that are flexible enough for variable widths, and updating our older templates to take advantage of this feature. Recent releases include Rounder (October), Elements (November), Vitreous (December) and Coffeehouse (February.) We currently have nine dynamic width layouts, each with 4-5 style variations.

In some cases like the new template Theatre, it is impossible to make the template a dynamic width as there are many small graphical details that must line up between areas of the site. In these cases, we’ve decided to choose presentation over flexibility (you can however adjust the Header, Canvas and Sidebar heights in the Custom CSS area of your custom style manager.)