7 Stages of Grief: The Blog Team Leader’s Edition

Posted April 29th, 2010 / By Jonathan Brill in Misc

As a Corporate Blog Team Leader, you will face many challenges, from getting the blog started to fighting for resources at the managerial level. But hands down, the most significant and most consistent issues will come from managing the blogging team. It will, at times, threaten the blog program entirely and have you thinking of creative ways to dispose of your fellow employees. For those of you futilely dog-paddling in the undertow of despair, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

1. SHOCK & DENIAL

The first time someone on your blog team blows off a deadline without so much as an apology, you’ll be shocked. The second time, you’ll convince yourself that they’re just having a bad run. The third time, you’ll realize that your blog team isn’t as perfect as you thought, some are going to need more motivation than you can provide, some will need more direction than you’ve given them, and some are very good at some aspects of blogging but utterly fail at others. The fun job of coordinating a loose team of peers to contribute to a mutually beneficial project has now turned into a job of managing overworked and underpaid employees for whom blogging has lost its romantic appeal. Good times!

2. PAIN & GUILT

Once the “blogging is fun!” fantasy is gone and the “blogging is a lot like my other work, only without all the pay” reality kicks in for you and your team, there will be an urge to assign blame. Most of this will fall on the person who sold the blog in the first place and is now responsible for it. If that’s you, get ready for a blame sandwich.

3. ANGER & BARGAINING

When you realize that your blogging team isn’t perfect and that your system could use some tweaking, you’ll try the easy route first. Maybe John just needs an extra day added to his deadline. Maybe Jane just needs some extra editing. Maybe Ali just needs some topic ideas. That may work for a bit. But it’s more likely that major changes will also have to take place. Maybe John just doesn’t have time for this? Maybe Jane just really can’t write? Maybe Ali doesn’t have anything interesting to say? Maybe your blog training was inadequate? Maybe your system doesn’t go far enough to help your bloggers with managing their assignments?

4. “DEPRESSION”, REFLECTION, LONELINESS

The basic assumptions you had when you started your blog will be questioned here: that your blog team would respect their responsibility once they’ve committed; that creativity would be the least of your worries; that the traffic you’d get would overwhelm your servers; that the job of managing the blog team would be a fun extracurricular diversion where the joy clearly outweighs the work involved. Oh, how we love our optimism. You may very well long for the days when you simply had to worry about the TPS reports.

5. THE UPWARD TURN

Once you dial back expectations on how often you can blog, how much work it takes to blog well, and the kind of traffic you can generate early, you’ll be able to achieve some consistency that will seem like nirvana.

6. RECONSTRUCTION & WORKING THROUGH

Good stuff happens when smart people do good work. It can be hard to predict what, exactly, will happen, and even harder to predict when, but it usually happens. In purging some of your less reliable teammates you can add ones who didn’t make the first cut. In finding out which parts of blogging present people with the most trouble, you can build out your system to account for those (picking topics, research, writing headlines, editing, online publishing, etc). As you achieve some consistency in publishing, you’ll be able to focus more on promotion, and your traffic, SEO, and leadgen will eventually start impressing people who depend on that stuff (sales, marketing, and management). More noticeable to you personally, however, will be how comfortable you’ll become with running a corporate blog team. You’ll realize that you could walk into any company and take on this role now. That’s saying something.

7. ACCEPTANCE & HOPE

The great thing about building a corporate blog machine is that you can continually improve it to the point where it runs “on rails”. As you fiddle with different parts of the program to see what works for you, you’ll also be looking for ways to automate those things so they don’t consume too much of your time. Spoiler alert: An underrated charm of your blog is that many of the benefits are “long tail”, so you won’t really get them until well after you’ve got the team and the process down. Search Engine Optimization, building a solid community, making the blog rolls of influential players in your industry; all of that takes a while no matter how good you are. If you get to that point, take a minute to appreciate what you’ve built. You certainly would have earned it.

Prolific247 has been building and managing business blogs since 2007. Building a Blog Machine is a collection of best practices and current information for corporate blogging. If you’d like to learn more, please find us at prolific247.com.