I attended a great webinar yesterday titled "Make Blog Content Work for You." Sponsored by Compendium Blogware, which hosts our blog, the session featured Chris Baggott, CEO and Co-Founder of Compendium, as well as their VP of Blogging Evangelism, Doug Karr.
Their webinar worked off of an October blog post by Doug on 200 content ideas for company bloggers. While I expected it to be marketing and somewhat technically focused, I didn't expect it to address employee engagement best practices, workplace team building, or anything else that I usually write about here.
I was surprised, therefore, when one of the tips Chris gave was to engage Generation X and Baby Boomer employees as blog writers if, in your workplace, they tend to hold any gripes toward, or have less camaraderie with, younger employees, who might be more accustomed to blogging.
I had read Debbie Weil's Corporate Blogging Book, and she talks at length about using employees to blog for your company, and how to set that up on the company's blog as well as on their personal blogs, but I don't remember her covering this generationally.
It might sound petty to have this be an employee engagement tool or incentive for older generations in your workforce, but the issue of pleasing them over time, as they see younger workers entering who certainly have a different set of affectations, is nonetheless a real issue on the minds of many small business leaders. It's part of what Jan Blittersdorf and Ann Jones-Weinstock of 2007 Top Small Workplace NRG Systems spoke about in their session on sustaining cultures in growing businesses at our Top Small Workplaces Conference last month. And last year we engaged My Plan After 50, an online life and retirement planning and coaching resource, to help outline employee engagement activities you can use to better satisfy these folks.
It can be very beneficial to use your talent to blog, on company time on a company-hosted blog, about the many issues, inside and out, that contribute to the satisfaction of both your employees and your customers or clients. (One of the biggies in my mind is the ability to control or at least shape the message that's out there about your products or services.) Why not encourage generational team building by putting people of different ages together to tackle this for your organization?
Do you have any interesting or ROI-reinforcing stories of having done this? Please share them below.
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