We need a business blog. But how do we get people to contribute?

Everybody now knows that a business blog is essential to be found on the world wild web, essential when you are an innovator who wants to share new ideas and a new way of doing things, essential for people to know what you are offering.

More than a year ago, a group of people sharing the same interest for Internet marketing decided it was time for Pyxis to have its own blog. But how the h… was it going to be possible to get people to blog? At Pyxis, many people are influencers and are used to speaking at conferences and addressing user groups, (that is why we have launched the podcast Vox Agile). But speaking and writing are two different stories.

The first thing we did to get started was to launch a contest that would last 4 weeks. People who would blog the most would win an iPod touch. Several people started to throw their ideas in writing. That is how it really started. It worked really well. Tremeur was the winner! (he now has his own blog). Then, Martin started his own and syndicated it to the Pyxis blog. He blogs constantly with great content. I’m sure that his blogs influence many others.

A main concern that first prevented people from contributing was the fear to be out of context. We emphasized in our communications that we did not want to impose a corporate guideline. We wanted the posts to reflect each person and to represent the culture of our company. The diversity of our employees is the wealth of our company. Talking about different subject is OK.  All people working at Pyxis are professionals. So far, we have never seen a post that was out of context or out of line. Surprisingly, another concern was making typo mistakes. To address this matter, a group of people offered their help to correct mistakes before publishing.

Also, we constantly provided statistics to encourage people. We wanted them to see that people are reading their posts. Posting comments (from co-workers to start with) helped a lot for bloggers to realise that what they have made an impact.

Today, Pyxis’ blog is an aggregation of 12 pyxissians’personal blogs.  We often read a post per day; on Agile project management, on scrum, on software development and many other topics.