So I presented my blog site yesterday to that group of staffing industry folks. And while I got many comments about how cool it was, I doubt that there will be a bunch of recruiting blogs popping up next week. We talked about how I use my blog to share info on our process, career advice and ask questions of people so we have a better idea of how potential candidates want to be reached. When I started talking about the success factors for blogging, I think people got scared. These are the things I think you need to have in order to be a successful corporate blogger:

1. Your blogging activity has to be in support of some kind of goal (for me, it's community building in the marketing space). Otherwise it's not work and you won't get the support you need
2. Executive sponsorship (thanks Bill!)
3. Established guidelines (for us here, they are truly guidelines)
4. A manager that trusts you not to say anything stupid (or if you do say something stupid, at least make sure it's not damaging)
5. A blogger that is committed to not only post regularly, but also to read other blogs, write comments, track links and respond to people that contact you (for me, I estimated this as 30 min to 2 hours a day)
6. A blogger that has something interesting to say (that can be tough...don't make me point out the posts I made on the slow days). Talking about yourself counts if it's not all you do ; )
7. Blogger with strong communications skills. Four categories came to mind here: writing, presenting (I've been doing more presenting lately than before and it's because of my blog), diplomacy and credibility. The last 2 might be subsets of the first
8. A PR department that doesn't vet everything you put out there

When I mentioned this last point, there was a collective “that's why we can't do it” sentiment. I hope some of you can be encouraged to be brave and do it. You might be surprised at how well it would be received.

The interesting thing for me is that I started blogging before I knew I had most of these success factors (I was pretty sure about 4-7 though). Some of them came later.  I guess I wanted to take a chance and wasn't afraid to get in trouble for it because I thought it was the right thing to do. The growing mass of Microsoft bloggers definitely contributed to my comfort level and I think also had a lot to do with us creating guidelines, etc. So maybe once some more technical folks out there start corporate blogging, recruiters will feel more comfortable jumping in. I just hope they don;t wait to long! 

In the meantime, I don't know why we aren't seeing recruiters from blog friendly companies out there (Macromedia, IBM, Google, etc.) doing it. I'm just saying.

Gerry Crispin, of CareerXRoads fame, said I inspired him to blog (now you have to do it, Gerry!). He's a cool guy and I really look forward to linking to his blog page!