Last week, three of my colleagues and I attended SXSW, as we spoke on four diverse panels. So, here’s a quick wrap-up of my session which took place a couple of days ago on the “Future of Corporate Blogging”. Rather than rehash what Lionel Menchaca, Kami Huyse (my fellow panelists) and I went over at SXSW, I figured this is probably the best time to go over the past, present and future of LinkedIn’s corporate blogging efforts.

1. The Past

When I started off at LinkedIn we probably belonged to a small group of web 2.0 companies that didn’t have a blog. Well, we definitely wanted to do it the right way and not let it be just as a me-too effort.  I still remember going over with the team on whether or not we wanted to allow comments, which received an overwhelming “D’uh” from everyone involved.

Some of the blogs I personally admire from a corporate blogging perspective are Dell (Lionel Menchaca) and Yahoo! (Nicki Dugan). Nicki has done a great job with Yodel Anecdotal allowing a diverse array of internal Yahoo! teams the opportunity to speak to the user through blog posts, while Lionel with his team at Dell have highlighted Dell’s user-focus with social media properties such as the Dell blog and Dell Ideastorm.

2. The Present

Our goals for the LinkedIn blog have been focused on two broad categories: User education on the newest LinkedIn feature and being a reliable source of LinkedIn news with plenty of opportunity for user feedback. Currently these are the two broad categories of blog posts you see on LinkedIn:

Using LinkedIn

Features
Tips and Tricks
Answers

LinkedIn News

Press
People
Events

Based on user feedback we realize that the most important category (from a user perspective) is of course – product feature announcements.  So, now we’ve upped the ante (I’ve always wanted to say that) with regular video based demos (by the product manager) for all major feature releases as well as screenshot based demos (whenever appropriate) and maybe a blooper reel every once in a while!

3. The Future

While the vision and goals for our social media efforts remain the same,what you’re likely to see in the future is an increase in the speed with which you get the News about LinkedIn as well as in responding to your comments. But while commenting on the blog, please bear in mind the basics of blog etiquette — no spam, no profanity, no slander, etc. All comments are moderated.

In addition to my quick responses to your comments, we’ll also ensure that wherever relevant we’ll make sure that the blog post author responds to you as well.

We’d love to hear your feedback on what you’d like to see on the blog. All you’ve to do is leave a comment here.