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 By Yang-May Ooi

A blog is not going to run itself, that’s for sure - especially a corporate blog where your CEO and senior executive team are busy with transactional business. Besides, blogs are personal journals detailing what you had for breakfast, aren’t they – how can they work for your high-worth, corporate business?

At The Housing Finance Corporation (THFC), we wanted a fresh, innovative way to engage with our clients and stakeholders after years of mailing out a PDF newsletter every quarter. The blogging platform was an obvious technology to use to create an interactive online presence for the business. But first, we had to consider some very real issues about reputation, brand and time-investment.

THFC is a specialist not-for-profit lender that makes loans to housing associations to provide affordable housing to tenants in housing need in the UK. Since 1987, we have lent £1.5 billion to the social housing sector, funded through the issue of bonds to private investors and by borrowing from banks. In this context, our online presence needed to reflect the serious business of finance and our unique position in the market.

The first obvious thing to consider was what we were going to blog about. What would engage our readers and give them a reason to keep coming back to read our blog? There are already a number of housing sector journals and magazines employing professional journalists to cover news and topical issues in the housing world. It would not make sense for our blog to try to be a housing news delivery portal. We wondered about commenting on sector news - but we would then be just an echo chamber for information that was already in the public domain. Piers Williamson, THFC’s Chief Executive, a long-time follower of political blogs with bite, was very clear that he did not want an anaemic online newsletter that had nothing innovative or bold to offer.

What seemed to be missing in the market was a forum for housing finance insiders and leaders to come together at a specialist level to share their expertise on current issues affecting the sector. Using the Wordpress blogging platform, we launched THFC Space, the online discussion space for housing sector Chief Executives, Finance Directors, Treasurers or equivalent. While the technology makes the site a blog, the content, focused as it is on housing finance and treasury management related issues, allows it to be approached by senior executives as a serious financial journal.

We also made the decision that THFC Space should be a private, members-only forum available on an invitation-only basis to CEOs and senior housing finance executives. Its articles deal with specific finance and treasury related topics requiring a high-level of sector knowledge and expertise for productive engagement by the readers. For Piers Williamson, “The joy of the blogosphere is its openness. However, the quality of around 90% of blog posts is dubious. THFC Space is targeted at CEO’s and CFO’s who have limited time to trawl typical blogs. By keeping the site ‘exclusive’ we aim to keep the quality of posts and debate up. The flip side is it takes longer to build up a truly inter-active exchange of ideas.”

For a specialist blog with a limited readership like this, the priority then is high quality articles rather than a high rate of published posts. We publish up to three articles every Wednesday and we have implemented an editorial process with regular team meetings and a bi-monthly planner and schedule for the delivery of articles. As editor, my job is to encourage the corporate team to come up with ideas for articles - as well as making sure they write them in time. To minimise the time the team spends “blogging”, I manage the administrative aspects of the blog such as uploading posts and images, reviewing comments and managing subscribers - so all the team have to do is focus on the writing.

As well as articles from within the organisation, a hallmark of THFC Space is to offer views from industry leaders, especially those with an insider’s specialist knowledge of topical issues. Piers Williamson’s view is that “THFC would by no means claim to come up with all the bright ideas. Equally, we think our customers are just as interested in listening to each other as they are to us and there is scope for leading ideas on a variety of finance and leadership issues to come from many sources”. For example, as a key report on financial regulation was published in June this year, we invited three leaders in the field - the deputy head of policy for the Council of Mortgage Lenders, the Chief Inspector of Housing and the Chief Executive of the National Housing Federation – to offer their reactions to the report. They were our first “guestbloggers” but I don’t think they or our readers would have thought of their contribution in that way!

Social media tools have also been useful in interspersing the serious articles with an occasional light-hearted touch – such as an online poll to gauge views on the reasons for planning delays and a slideshow of photographs from our recent 20^th anniversary celebration.

The main challenge week on week for us is the management of the process – contacting guest writers, making sure that articles are written, adding new members and uploading and formatting the posts and images. But as managing THFC Space becomes part of our weekly routine, the blog is ingraining itself into our transactional work – our executive team are finding opportunities to remind clients to visit the online forum and noticing issues that would make good articles. By sharing expert views on our particular industry with our clients, THFC Space has become another way we can add value to our stakeholders offline as well as online.

For corporations looking at blogging and social media as ways to extend their online presence, I would suggest that the keys to successful engagement lie in:

• Knowing the audience you want to engage with

   

• Finding a USP (unique selling point) for your blog/ social media presence

   

• If calling it a blog isn’t helpful, call it something else.

   

• Setting up a proper management/ editorial process and the specific role of Blog / Social Media Manager

   

• Having an engaged blogging team

   

• Finally, and most importantly, leading from the front, preferably at Chief Executive or other senior management level

   

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