At our small local radio station (I know it's not YC, but I hope this is vaguely relevant), the blog is pretty awful. It's simply an endless stream of calls-to-

At our small local radio station (I know it's not YC, but I hope this is vaguely relevant), the blog is pretty awful. It's simply an endless stream of calls-to-action along the lines of "come to event X on Saturday", or "listen to our new drive time host", or even "visit our sponsor, XYZ Ford on High Street". It's quite possibly the bossiest blog I've ever come across, and being the muppet who's ended up in charge of web stuff I write most of it! We don't even have commenting turned on by order of management, "in case someone was to post something offensive". In common with most things related to the radio industry's fumbling forays into the online world, it's like something from 1996. Accordingly, visitor numbers are through the floor. Given a free rein to write what I wanted, I'd change the tone of the thing completely. First, I'd start writing posts that really put across the atmosphere of an exciting radio station full of creative people. I'd make posts about funny or interesting things that had happened that day, guests we'd had in the studio, events we'd reported from. I'd point readers to things on the web that we'd liked and give them an insight into what it's like behind the scenes. Perhaps--shock horror--we might even write occasionally about things that aren't work-related and are of interest to people outside our immediate audience, in the same way as Pingdom, that uptime-monitoring firm that gets on the social news sites every five minutes. Then I'd flip the commenting switch and turn what is currently a fairly dull company mouthpiece into a conversation, where listeners could tell us what they thought and communicate with us and between themselves. I might just do it and see what happens. On a related note, the blog at http://onegoldensquare.com/ http://onegoldensquare.com/ makes for an interesting read. It's from a British national radio station called Virgin Radio, which is changing its name and programming. Rather than smothering itself with the thick veil of confidentiality that usually surrounds the radio industry when it does things like this, they've set up the blog with posts by staff from the programme controller down about what they're doing and why they're doing it, along with writing on all sorts of diverse subjects. It's a refreshing change and well worth a quick look at as an example of a quality company blog.