Developing your corporate blog

Hugh put up an email he had received from a company just starting out with their corporate blog – Raw Digital.

My name is [*Name Witheld*], one of staff members at [*Name Witheld*], an independent production company in New York. Our digital media division has just launched a new blog, and would like to link our readers to yours. In exchange, we ask that to be added to your blog roll.

Hugh rightly called them to task, suggesting that this was not the best behaviour. Part of my comment:

Of course they are still doing this – and they’ll be doing it for a while longer. As building ‘relationships’ online increases, as more and more companies and their agencies see see it as a powerful tool to spread the word of their brand, you are going to be see more of this. The number of people who have learnt the lessons is dwarfed by the number of people who are going to have to learn the lessons.

There’s a whole lot of stuff out there on the web about doing social media, about reaching out to people but sometimes the lesson is hard to learn, even when there is someone on the team to teach, it still may not be internalised. Earlier this year, Adam described this as cargo-cult blogging, when it happened in his team.

But this company proved to be a quick learner, when the CEO came and commented (see Hugh’s post for full copy):

Like everyone else, we’re learning as we do and your post is a lesson for us. And this time we’ve learned our lesson.

This is joining in the conversation and earning links for merit than for the asking. So how do you get links?