The second rule of Social: how to make your blog worth the time it takes

About half of FORTUNE 500 companies are pursuing a social strategy and just about every marketing company claims they’re experts at creating one.

Some corporations figured it out and the rest are trying to. Comcast and Dell were trailblazers. The Fleishman-Hillard PR guy who blogged about how much he hated Memphis just before the meeting at FedEx was the first victim.

The experts will tell the first rule of an effective social strategy is great content, updated frequently. Write, edit, post, repeat.

A blog that’s worth producing focuses on the author’s special point of view. It’s hard because most of us don’t have that many opinions that we can back up with 500 words.

And if generating the content isn’t difficult enough, blog postings should be consistent with your company’s or your personal brand.

So, really, is it even worth doing? Several executives I respect have told me that maintaining their own blog doesn’t pass a cost-benefit analysis. Takes too much time. Not enough return on investment. Who’s gonna read it, anyway? 20 people? My boss? The competition? Mom?

That’s where the second rule of social comes in.

The second rule of a successful social strategy is repurposing your content. What you post on the blog should be promoted across online locations. As long as you have something worthwhile to say, repurposing it is how the investment of time required to maintain a blog will pay off.

Create once, distribute across similar websites and social networks that point back to your blog.
Repurposing is particularly relevant when you’re talking about senior executives of a company who must commit valuable time to feed the blog with their own content that corporate lawyers will approve and that readers will bother to finish.

Some of the channels are basic:

• Your Facebook feed
• Twitter (there, executives; there’s your use for Twitter)
• LinkedIn (your network and relevant LinkedIn groups)

What you’re trying to do is grow a critical mass of readers. Remember, one forwarding of a blog post equals an average seven additional impressions, so you quickly get past the idea that only 20 people will read it.

There are other ways to stretch the value of a relevant blog post:

• Email it to thought-leaders (in some cases, that might be bloggers who work for the competition)
• Send it to industry writers who cover the topic in trade publications
• Research upcoming panels and conferences that involve topic of your post and email the presenter
• Make sure the blog is ranked in Google, Bing, Yahoo and Flickr so future postings will automatically show up in keyword searches

Every blogger gets hooked on metrics and uses that as the yardstick of whether it’s worth the time. Who read my post? How many people? More than last time? What feedback did I get from…anybody?

After a few relevant blog postings, repurposed across many outlets, the issue won’t involve 20 readers. It’ll be feeding the blog beast with more good stuff.