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Andy’s Answers: How Scholastic developed its corporate blog

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Brands & Campaigns

When Scholastic decided to launch its On Our Minds blog, the goal was to engage in the millions of online conversations about literacy, kids, education, and books in a meaningful way.

But the company didn’t want to just jump in with a comment here and there — it wanted to show it would be there for the long term.

In their recent BlogWell presentation, Scholastic’s Ivy Li and Tyler Reed took us behind the scenes of how the blog is doing just that. A few of their tips:

  • Separate your blog from your sales-focused website. The focus of the On Our Minds blog is on engagement, not marketing. Not only was the content unique to the blog, but they also hosted it on its own domain, off of Scholastic.com.
  • Get lots of writers involved and collaborating often. Scholastic’s nine bloggers have different areas of expertise and focus — and they meet every week to discuss content strategies and the overall editorial calendar.
  • Be an active participant in the community. When the blog was launched, Ivy and Tyler’s team regularly linked to other blogs. The more they linked out, the more that other blogs linked back. This eventually led to a Friday feature called “In Our Feeds,” where Scholastic’s bloggers compile a list of links that they found shareworthy.