Walmart’s Corporate Blog

Walmart is good at social media, and they’ve launched their corporate blog well. What can your company learn from it?

Well, first, that you should have a blog. Walmart has had blogs before, and has had some trouble with them, but the figures on the value of business blogging are persuasive enough that they were bound to return to blogging at some point. So should you.

Here’s how Walmart announced their new blog:

Walmart Launches New Corporate Blog

March 3, 2014 – Today marks the launch of the Walmart Blog. Our goal with this new channel is to tell real stories that you might not have heard, and our hope is that we can bring you a renewed perspective about our company.

This announcement was in the News & Views section of the corporate website. As you can see in this screenshot from the Wayback Machine, that was the closest thing to a blog before the new launch:
wayback

But Walmart didn’t just post, “Hello World! This is my first blog post! Come back often!” as so many new blogs do.
First, they began posting at blog.walmart.com in January for the March launch. Then they added content from the past, like the December 2013 post below — when, as we can see from the screenshot above, there was no blog. This particular article, and quite a few others, came from www.walmartgreenroom.com, which now redirects to the new blog.

 

walmart-solstice-blog

Walmart’s brand new blog has posts from back in 2012. The day it launched, it already looked established and had related posts (okay, fleet efficiency isn’t really related to celebrating the solstice with your family, but computers aren’t that good at this particular task).

You can do the same thing when you launch your company blog by pulling articles from newsletters you’ve sent out, expanding on Facebook posts, or simply hiring people to write some stuff. In Walmart’s case, there were some websites in their stable that perhaps weren’t doing what Walmart had hoped they would, and they could be repurposed for the corporate blog. You might have resources like that, too.

On launch day, they created a number of new posts — enough to fill their blog’s grid. These were mostly short posts with strong photos or videos, and their list of topics included both reputation management posts like a 17 year old’s upbeat “Career in Retail” and a response to controversy over their “I Am a Factory” commercial, and feel-good posts on being healthier, the First Lady, and sustainability. A clear editorial direction and a nice mix of topics can keep people reading and bring them back.

Walmart is the biggest retail company in the world and your company may be much smaller, but you can use the same lessons to launch your blog boldly. Need help? Email Rebecca@HadenInteractive or fill out our quick and easy Contact form.


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