Conference & Corporate Blogging as a Marketing Tool

What we learned from experience—plus good sources and examples

by Tara Hunt, HRPAO

Having been one of those "radical" bloggers for the past couple of years, I surprised even myself when I suggested that my workplace use a blog for our annual conference.

Blogs were born from the need to easily publish personal voices online. Blogs, by the nature of the medium, encourage casual banter and informal language. Unlike Web sites, which are crafted and branded and carefully planned out to be "on message," the daily journal format of a blog produces more vulnerability from its authors. In marketing terms, a blog can bring a human personality to a faceless company, which can create a connection between the corporation and the client. This can lead to deeper loyalty and richer feedback.

Why a Blog?

The Human Resources Professionals Organization of Ontario (HRPAO) is a member-driven organization. We provide many resources for our members, including an online knowledge and legal center, professional development seminars, conferences and Webinars, a professional certification program, government advocacy and much more. Our annual conference is the organization’s flagship event and holds the highest profile as it grows every year.

The three-day conference is a culmination of everything our organization provides and is attended by members and non-members from across Canada, the United States and overseas. Because of the size of the conference, the organization produced a printed newsletter every day as a communiqué to delegates, broadcasting announcements, highlighting speakers and printing photos. For non-attendees, the daily newsletter was converted to PDF and uploaded onto the Web site for download.

Although we offset the cost of printing this newsletter by selling sponsorship, the production of the piece was internal-resource heavy and the end result’s effectiveness wasn’t measurable. When the subject of the daily printed newsletter came up in our planning meetings, I suggested using a conference blog to report online rather than continuing to print the daily news. Because blogs had been in the news a great deal, the conference organizers decided to give it a try.

The Steps Involved

The first thing we had to do was find a blog program that was compatible with our Microsoft Content Management System because we wanted to host it as part of our Web site so it would be indexed on our site search engine. After our Information Systems staff looked into it, we decided to go with newIntelligence’s dasBlog, a free, BSD-licensed weblog engine for the .NET Framework provided by newtelligence AG. However, there are many solutions out there whether you want to host it yourself or host it with an outside provider.

After this, came the fun part: what do we call the blog? What does it look like? What kind of structure does it take? Who writes for it? What do they write about? All of the answers to these questions depend on what your team wants to achieve through the blog. In our case, we wanted to stay true to the nature of weblogging while adhering to the look and feel of the conference.

The theme of the conference was HR on the Move, which represented the growth of the industry, so we chose HR on the Moon as a title for the blog. We wanted to signify growth at the speed of light as well as reference the use of technology to get there. At the same time, the title was a fun play on words, which nicely illustrated the blogosphere itself.

From there, our structure and content flowed from the previous printed edition, while our design was determined by sponsorship desires. Our writers were assembled from student members, HRPAO staff and sponsor writers, and all were encouraged to write in their own personal style and "have fun with it."

There were both advantages and drawbacks to having a sponsor. When the sponsorship team sought a backer for financing the Internet terminals that would be placed around the conference site to promote and give easy access to the blog, I requested a media patron, so that we could add a couple more writers to our roster. Having a sponsor expedited the process and gave the blog a bigger push at the conference. However, while the sponsors were wonderful to work with, writers had to be extra careful with content postings to make certain that our sponsors’ competitors didn’t get any airtime in the reporting process. As far as editorial goes, this is a good thing to note in the guidelines.

Without crossing over to become a total marketing tool, we were able to cover most of the conference speakers, the exhibition and the events without too much problem. My advice to those setting up a blog for any corporate means is to sit down and discuss the nature of blogs and set down some clear editorial guidelines. Make certain that sponsors and/or senior management take a look at some other blogs online to get a feel of why blogs have become such a popular communications tool. Send them everything from the news sources to the online diaries.

There are some "givens" when it comes to deleting inappropriate content: slander, swearing, profanity, defaming, divulging of sensitive financial data and other obvious things to avoid. Guidelines should be laid out in a procedural document and handed out to all of the writers involved. This may sound like tight restrictions for such an open medium, but when the guerrilla tactic meets the corporate world, some of the anarchy may have to give way to structure. Of course, the way that each organization approaches the medium will be different and some companies, like Sun Microsystems for instance, use blogging as a free-for-all tool, braving the occasional disgruntled comment for the overall positive viewpoint that they are a company that encourages open-minded innovation.

The Results: What Worked

Our conference blog was very successful. A post-conference survey revealed that a majority of the conference participants knew about the blog, almost 40% of them actually read the blog, and many others were quick to give tips and comments regarding what they wanted to see in the blog for the following year. Some of the comments received included wanting to see more tips for out-of-towners, advance exhibitor "contest" alerts (who is having iPod giveaways specifically) and where to find them and overall comments on the visibility of the weblog (needed to find out what it was, where they could go to access it and what information it included). The exhibitors at the trade show also loved the blog and used our writers to promote their contest giveaways and announce winners.

The Results: What Didn’t Work

There were a few issues that complicated or reduced the impact of the blog overall for the conference. Lack of visibility was one of the biggest issues. The combination of our members not being familiar with the medium and the late start on promoting the blog as a conference tool resulted in lower awareness than we hoped. Because of late approvals and planning, we had only two weeks before the conference kicked off to promote the blog. A broadcast e-mail went out to our entire membership that promoted the blog and how to use it, but our members could have used a much earlier awareness period to try out the medium. As well, by launching it late in the game, we missed out on the opportunity of including the URL in any of the printed conference materials, which would have increased awareness and understanding.

The lack of familiarity with the medium should have been addressed through more online demonstrations. As well as promoting the benefits and the existence of the blog, our members would have benefited from a lesson in usability. Because of the prevalence of blogs in the news these days as well as our commitment to introducing them in other areas, this issue should be rectified for next year’s conference.

We also encountered various sponsorship issues with the blog. Because the conference enjoyed a wide array of sponsors, many of whom are market competitors, choosing one particular sponsor for the blog created the occasional conflict of interest. One particular story about a rival sponsor’s mascot had to be pulled because the sponsor did not want to promote their competitor anywhere on the blog, even though the story was an entertaining and viable one and didn’t prompt the user to check out the rival product. It is always best with the weblog medium to leave the editorial direction as open as possible—the more interests that are added, the more the blog functions as more of a brochure than a blog, losing its "personal" impact overall.

Having a sponsor also skewed the look and the feel of the blog site, so eliminating sponsorship for this particular item would allow us to better align the overall conference with the blog brand.

What We’ll Do Differently Next Time

For future years, I would start posting changes and announcements on the blog sooner than the actual conference days, so that delegates would get used to visiting this source for news early on. The medium is still pretty new for most of our members, so we can only grow from here.

Although we are discussing creating member-only blogs for some association information, the Annual Conference blog will remain open access because it acts as an excellent marketing tool for those not in attendance. We continue to get hits and high search engine placement for surfers looking for specific speakers and HR conferences. I enjoyed the end-result of the various writing styles and would like to add an even more diverse group of writers for the blog next year—pulling volunteers from student members and CHRP (Certified Human Resource Professional) candidates.

Each year, we can adjust the look and the name of the blog to support our changing conference theme, perhaps even using early marketing to involve association members in the naming of it. Overall, because this project has gone from "pilot" to part of the overall marketing, we will promote the blog much earlier on in all of the conference materials—something that our late start for this conference didn’t allow us to do.

Once the presence of the blog is widely known among our members and non-member conference delegates, we will have the opportunity to promote the RSS feeds for conference updates and teasers. The opt-in technology will make an exciting addition to our marketing efforts for the conference and allow our Events Team to send out multiple messages a day through the blog postings, without being concerned with member e-mail fatigue. It will also be a great medium to experiment with the effectiveness of various marketing messages. We can record the amounts of posting-views and feedback we receive on each message to gauge the popularity.

Overall, the blog proved to be an economical way to report on the conference happenings. The software costs to set up a blog can run you from free to a small monthly charge ($10 - $50/USD) depending on your needs. Because we went with freeware, we didn’t spend anything on the software. The labor costs could potentially run a little higher if you require a consultant or external designers. We set up our blog in-house in under two weeks—one week for design and approvals, one week for programming and testing—with a three-person design team.

Because there were nominal costs associated with the blog itself, the sponsorship was a packaged deal to pay for the Internet terminals positioned around the conference site, which allowed conference delegates to check their e-mail, surf the Web and check out the blog. The cost of setting these up depends on your conference site and the amount of terminals needed. Next year, we are separating the sponsorship of the Internet terminals from the blog itself, so that there are no possibilities of conflicts of interests with news posts or the branding.

Whether you use blogs to reach your customers by making your CEO sit down and talk about his or her job, vacations and the new product lines every day or you use them as a news source for your organization, the potential of this medium is just starting to be tapped by marketers looking for new, inexpensive ways to promote their clients. Our foray into utilizing blogs as a marketing tool was just the beginning and we are developing several other information source-type blogs as I write this.

More Resources:

http://www.corporateblogging.info/

http://www.jimcarroll.com/articles/mktg22.htm

http://www.thenewpr.com/wiki/pmwiki.php/Resources/CEOBlogsList (CEO Bloggers List)

HR on the Moon: the official 2005 conference blog. [http://www.hrpao.org/hronthemoon/]

Tara Hunt has been the New Media Manager for the Human Resources Professionals Association of Ontario (HRPAO) for the past two years. She is very proud of the benchmarks that HRPAO has set through its digital marketing program and its online presence.