Should your company start its own blog?

It may seem like a no-brainer. After all, blogs have established themselves as credible tools to connect with stakeholders in ways that traditional one-way media do not.

But starting a blog because everyone else is doing it is the first step toward failure. If memory serves, this excuse didn’t work too well in high school, and it doesn’t work now, either.

Before you reserve a domain name, install the software and tell all your friends, you may want to take some quiet time to consider what you hope to accomplish with it. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Why are you considering starting a blog?
• What’s the value proposition for people who might read it?
• Precisely who’s going to read it?
• What kind of resources will you be able to devote to your blog?

If you’re not able to come up with solid answers to these basic questions, take the time to think them through. Talk to your stakeholders, solicit feedback from them on what you’re doing well - and not so well - from a communications perspective. Use their feedback to identify where you could be doing a better job of keeping them in the loop.

That last piece - finding ways to improve the way we communicate with our stakeholders - is critical. Blogs are only one of the many tools available to today’s businesses to reach out and engage the people who matter. Depending on the outcome of this early, informal process, you may or may not decide that launching a blog makes sense at this time.

In subsequent blog entries, we’ll explore this prep process more deeply. For now, take the time to think the blog rationale through, and feel free to share the results in a comment.

Last time out, we discussed whether or not you should even start a blog. On the assumption that you’ve decided to move ahead with it, you’ll need to go through a number of due diligence steps before your site sees the light of day.

We touched on what you would write about, who would read it, and why. Write these out on a large piece of paper and post them somewhere visible, because you’re going to be mulling them over for quite a while.

WHAT: There are a lot of voices on the Internet talking about a lot of different issues from a lot of different perspectives. Is your voice one among many or do you have something unique to say? Would you be able to sum up your blog’s reason for existence in a 30-second elevator pitch. Stop here and really think this through before you do anything else, because if there’s nothing unique and uniquely compelling about your message, there’s no point in reading - or writing.

WHO: It’s a given that we all want lots of people to read us, but you still need to understand who would be most interested in what you have to say. Separate readers by age range, gender, geography, ethnicity, income level…or any other point of differentiation that makes sense to you. Research your target groups online to see what else they’re reading. And if you remember nothing else, resist the urge to be all things to all people, because nothing is more vanilla than a broadly focused blog.

WHY: This explains why they’ll take time from their busy schedules to read you. It speaks to the value that you’re bringing to the table - to their table. If you can’t articulate it, chances are your readers won’t, either - which means they likely won’t become readers.

Take a stab at answering these. Bounce your responses off of people you trust. We’ll dig deeper into each of them in future entries.