In her new post, Why Buy the Cow?, Kate Schackai lampoons as “poppycock” the notion that providing goods and services for free constitutes a valid business model. She notes that what looks “free” is typically a clever bit of misdirection disguising highly successful for-profit business strategies.

Cases in point: Google and Facebook, the poster children for “free.” The social media titans are often cited as the archetypes of how to win by giving away something for nothing. In fact, that something is a pittance compared to what they gain: a universe of priceless customer data.

“Those free-service users aren’t the customers,” writes Schackai. “They are, instead, the commodity being sold as advertising targets to a sprawling market of paying clients. Google and Facebook do give out gift certificates for ad space (on the model of a dealer offering a taste), but we’re talking about a very limited sample for free, not a smorgasbord.”

Google’s and Facebook’s real customers are, of course, advertisers, not users. Both companies fully recognize the distinction and leverage it to the hilt. You will never find either giving away its real product — customer data — to paying customers.

Any company that doesn’t see the difference will find itself “well-liked and out of business,” Schackai notes. She isn’t alone in dismissing “free.” Leaders in the tech and communications industries are moving in the same direction. Most recently:

• Fox Broadcasting, a division of News Corp, now charges for previously free TV content.
• “Over the top” (OTT) video services such as Hulu — which came to prominence by offering free TV — now charge for premium content.
• Analysts speculate that all Hulu content and perhaps many other OTT video services will soon go the same route.

In short, the era of free TV may have come and gone. In other industries, however, companies continue to muddle on, zombie-like, deluding themselves on the business value of free.

Earlier this year we spoke with a venture capital firm which launched a content marketing content program in 2010 for the express purpose of generating new clients. The company’s content was high quality — I loved it — full of practical tips, and had created a large, loyal following. I congratulated the program director and asked how much new business she’d won.

“Well, none as yet,” she gulped. So I had to ask the rude question: “If your free content initiative isn’t meeting the baseline goal of bringing in new business, in what sense is it a success?”  The nice young lady waffled for a bit, but never really answered the question. As the Scots say, “nae answer is an answer.”

Many companies, unless they’re as clever as Google and Facebook, are in the same position as that venture capital firm: Doing “free” merely because it’s the thing to do, or perhaps because the usual profit-driven business model isn’t working for them — which is fairly damning in itself.

It’s possible that their social media programs, which constitute a sort of “free” activity, are driven by the same motive: herd mentality. Often, companies blog, tweet, Facebook and comment because their competitors do. Whether any of this effort produces a measurable business result for them is hard to say. The worst case scenario is when an enterprise engages in “free” just to look busy — and distract attention from their lack of free’s opposite: profit.

But let’s not pick on “free’s” victims when it’s the perps that deserve time in the stockades. The most contemptible aspect of the “free” movement: Its proponents actually give away very little, and instead make a very lucrative living from selling books, consulting services and speaking gigs. Bully for them — nothing wrong with capitalism. What merits a public flogging: the hypocrisy of making a buck by telling others to work for free.

Personally, I’m so fed up with this malarkey that I’m tempted to write a book about the business model of my Viking ancestors and call it, “Pillage and Plunder.”

How about you — have you had it up to here with “free” yet?

Shouldn’t all that we create, even in the mundane realm of business, operate on this principle — to inspire an audience?

Today, in the world of corporate social media, we are surrounded by pundits who urge us to churn out “content.” The spirit of a single piece matters far less than the purported collective impact of multiple ones. And so we must blog, tweet and connect on Facebook consistently and on schedule. It’s a routine, like brushing your teeth or coming your hair, and just that interesting.

Those who produce such “content” are much like factory workers in a smokestack industry. They stamp out the words on a digital drill press, embellishing with hypertext that invariably leads to a corporate sales pitch.

Inspiration’s got nothin’ to do with it. Ninety-nine percent of corporate social media comes straight off an assembly line. Content marketers are the absolute worst. When I hear the expression “content marketing,” I think “mass production.”

Anybody want to read or view that stuff? Not me. So why “produce” it?

I was going to leave you with a few bullet points, but somehow the idea of presenting rules seems counter-intuitive here. Instead I’ll pose three questions:

• When you write, or make a video, or whatever — are you creating something or merely hammering together familiar words, phrases and images?
• Will your audience share in your original enthusiasm?
• Will it inspire them to do something as good or better?

The world is full of hacks. Those that inspire are rare. China’s T’ang dynasty poet Li Po may have best expressed the difference between the two in these lines:

A CONFRONTATION WITH TU FU

When the gods so please

they fling incense and wine

onto the simmering forge of my mind

which, catching the coals of ideas,

blazes forth a fragrant breeze.

You, Tu Fu, who chisel and polish verse,

your wit attending your purse –

and all for the pleasure of the Empress –

will never understand this.

In the late 1980s I worked for a company called Telenet, Sprint’s data division. More people were using email by then, but primarily via closed commercial systems like Sprintmail and MCI Mail, or offered as a free add-on in closed proprietary systems tied to company mainframes. At Sprint we were immersed in developing X.400 APIs (application program interfaces) that would allow users on one system to send and receive emails to and from users on any system — something considered well nigh impossible at the time.

We were convinced that if we could just make X.400 APIs work, everyone would use email and somehow money would rain from the skies. By the time I left Sprint for MCI in late 1990, you could get an X.400 email address that was almost too long to fit on a business card. X.400 never worked very well. For the most part email remained a giveaway.

By the early-1990s the SMTP and MIME standards, combined with the POP and IMAP client applications, vastly simplified the job of sending and receiving text and binary files.  Email took off.  Millions, then hundreds of millions of people began to use it. Maybe now it’s billions of people.  Regardless, to this day no one has ever made a dime on email.

Parts of this story remind me of today’s corporate love affair with content marketing. It’s not a perfect analogy, to be sure.  There are no technological barriers to doing content marketing — just the opposite, it’s so simple that anyone can do it.  And, from the flood of social media content and email newsletters pouring out of the Web, some days it seems like everyone is.

Where I see a similarity: The blind conviction that content marketing will generate revenue. Maybe that’s true for some.  However, when I talk to companies about their content marketing programs I hear the same tale over and over: “We did this to bring in more business and thus far have generated a huge increase in awareness — thousands of visitors to our site every month, thousands of subscribers to our e-newsletter, and hundreds of people who regularly attend our webinars.”

As for new customers, though?  Zilch.  Yet, in every case, the companies tout the success of content marketing as a principal driver of heightened brand awareness.  All fine and well.  We all love brand awareness.  But is there a quantifiable ROI on content marketing? Not to be rude, but can anyone “show me the money”?

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not dissing content marketing.  I am saying, however, that we are still “early days” with this thing. I have this inescapable feeling that we’re missing something or that the full picture hasn’t crystallized. Perhaps content marketing, like email, will never in itself turn a nickel — or maybe it will some day in ways that just aren’t clear now, for example as a vehicle for another feature or app that’s hugely profitable. . .like targeted advertising is for Google.

Meantime, grab your partner. The band’s striking up a tune, and whether we understand the steps to this dance or not — or who’s leading whom — we’re all moving our feet in time with the Content Marketing Rag.

1. Concentrate on Your Niche. Pick the 2 – 3 topics your company is best known for and concentrate on these in your social public relations. Large diverse companies often make the mistake of blogging and tweeting on everything they do or know about. Result: Their social media identify looks like a case of multiple personalities.
2. Showcase a Personality for Each Topic. Hand in hand with too many topics, companies often feature too many bloggers. People follow leaders, not masses. Individual personalities are what make social media “social.” Showcase your company’s lead visionary — someone that followers can readily identify with.
3. Talk Like a Human Being. How many posts have you read that read like a brochure? When that happens it’s likely because the blog started out in the marketing department. It’s fine to source ideas from a company brochure or white paper, but remember that blogging is a personal medium. Sound real. Write like you speak.
4. Speak to Your Audience. Relate to your audience by focusing on their needs and interests, and by integrating close understanding of key industry trends into all social pr.
5. Keep it Short. If site visitors wanted to read a book or view a full-length feature movie, then they’d do so. Spending more than a few minutes with a post is not what they have in mind. Keep text, video and audio posts brief. People often click right through a text post that takes up more than a screen. Ditto for videos and podcasts any longer than a minute or two.
6. Optimize. Provide links to other useful content on your site that sheds additional light on the topic. Links to product lit are okay if written objectively — but not if they’re a sales pitch.
7. Re-purpose for Publishing. Professionally produced content can have a second life. If it was good enough for your site, it may be good enough for online media looking for guest pieces. If you’ve already posted a piece to your site, be up front with editors about that — some won’t accept content that’s been used elsewhere, but you may get around that stipulation with some judicious editing. Many editors now accept informative company videos, too.

What sets successful initiatives apart from flops? Often it’s simplicity vs. complexity. When a thing functions simply and cleanly — think Apple iPad — it’s not only great, it’s “magic.”

Prognosticators tend to base forecasts on “surface volatility” — hot stories of the moment: smart phones, Netflix, etc. What about the deeper currents that move markets? The following signature events of 2010 may provide clues to what lies ahead.

• Markets: The “Flash Crash” of May 2010. Almost forgotten now, the sudden drop of stock markets on that black day in May transformed “The Rise of the Machine” from Hollywood sci-fi to real life. With the vast majority of equity transactions now managed by banks of computers in data centers, and with traders addicted to “low latency” (i.e., next to real time speed) at any price, it may only be a matter of time before a single programmed order triggers selling that sends financial markets spiraling out of control once again.
• Corporate Performance: Record Gains Without New Hiring. Most analysts credit deep budget and personnel cuts for companies’ outstanding financial performance in 2010, but say it’s unsustainable and warn that real growth can’t occur until hiring picks up. They’re wrong about the last two parts. Because software is cheap and people are expensive, companies will continue to “cut” at every opportunity and profit handsomely thereby.
• Networks: Fiber is Cool Again. When the telecom bubble burst a decade ago, analysts and media were quick to condemn over-investment by operators in fiber optic networks, arguing that eons would pass before anyone found a use for so much bandwidth. Guess what? The eon arrived shortly afterward in the form of mobile broadband, video and social media. Now we can’t get enough fiber, and network operators that can’t keep pace with mobile broadband demand are faulted for inadequate capacity.
• Public Exposure: WikiLeaks Turns to Private Enterprise. To date, most public attention has focused on WikiLeaks’ revelations of government misdeeds. But remember that in late November Julian Assange threatened to take down an American bank. That news has so rattled Bank of America that they’ve spent the last month scouring internal databases for possible breaches and considering what data, if leaked, could do the most damage. Because Assange likely won’t stop at banks, every company should be updating its crisis pr plan.

Each of these events is tied to the rising ubiquity of automation, the deep silent trend of 2010. Whether it involves market trades, corporate streamlining, bandwidth growth or the rapid dissemination of information, the phenomenon of mass automation is endemic and irreversible. Where it flourishes, money and reputation can be made — or lost, depending — in a flash.

To illustrate the point. . .

Recently our own Kate Schackai posted a blog on Customer Think, a well-known site that showcases thousands of blogs yearly by experts in customer relations, marketing and social media. Her topic: the need for a different measure of social media’s impact based on KPIs versus the usual ROI formulas. The editor informed Kate that he selected her blog as one of the week’s “10 Best” to be featured in the Customer Think enewsletter sent to more than 100,000 subscribers. Concurrently, a comment on Kate’s blog posted on an article in Ad Age generated the highest-ever number of visits to our web site. None of this surprised me. She’d created great content. I can cite five reasons for the immense appeal and success of this post and its re-publication:

1. Hot Topic. Nearly every major company investing heavily in social media faces increases scrutiny from corporate financial types demanding proof of ROI. Contrary to popular notions that social media is “free,” this endeavor of course places extensive new resource demands on companies. Now that the gold rush fever of social media has died down, bean counters naturally want accountability. Kate’s blog hit on an issue that is top of mind with everyone.
2. Authoritative Voice. The author did a deep dive into the subject, backed by extensive research. Readers knew from the start and throughout that this was not a sales pitch or wandering point of view, but rather, a studied, carefully reasoned examination of the topic. She spoke with authority.
3. Solution. This was neither the usual “throw up your hands” study of social media pointing to the impossibility of applying old metrics to a new field, nor the obverse: that accurate measurement of social media hinges on applying obstruse mathematical formulas. Kate offered an accessible, common sense approach to measuring social media via KPIs. Readers came away with immediately usable “to do’s.”
4. “Carrier Grade.” The blog stood out as a professionally written piece. Artful and well-crafted, the blog informed and entertained. Editors know good from humdrum.
5. Popularity. The same applies to readers. For all the above reasons, this blog resonated with the public. As of today, it has logged 984 “reads.”

In contrast to this example, I cite the current tendency of many companies to view social media as a quota-based mission elevating quantity over quality.  This “content factory” thinking commonly takes two forms:

1. The Un-Managed Subject Matter Expert. SMEs with a fixed point of view but little skill in presenting it churn out poorly written blog posts. The company publishes them as is, just to have fresh content up on its site. Dead giveaways: (1) the piece is a reverse engineered sales pitch that presents the company’s own product or service as an objective argument or solution; (2) you know this for a fact when multiple page links in the blog land on other corporate sales pitches.
2. The Outsourced or Canned Blog. The company hires an outside firm to produce short daily posts, typically a rewrite of current news with a corporate plug at the end. Inexpensive and prolific, such services provide a mechanized and largely hands-off method of churning out great volumes of content. Nobody’s fooled. Site visitors see some slight variation of stories they’ve already read at the source, and click right through.

As you look ahead to 2011, consider the following random thoughts:

• GigaOM reports that 90 percent of the world’s data was created fresh in the just the past two years. At some point, all of this data transits a network and is viewed by someone.
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, once said that he sees most daily news and information as “noise,” and as a result rarely bases an important decision on any of it.

Today’s immense volume of data totals one exabyte — a million terabytes. Think of it as your competition for mind share.

Your social media and PR: Is it just more noise, or does it have that rare quality that keeps people tuned in and coming back for more?

Best known as the author of Animal Farm and 1984, Orwell also was a prolific essayist. My personal favorite: his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, a look at the state of prose across many fields — science, philosophy, psychology, the arts, journalism, and, of course, politics. Among Orwell’s observations:

Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

That was exactly the problem with my client’s brochure. The freelancer wrote in units of catch phrases and buzz words: wave of the future, key to the future, key to success, the next level, get positioned for, in the run-up to, a vital first step on the journey, achieve market penetration, close the gap, opportunity and challenge, work in real time, take full advantage of, falls off quickly, require greater agility, Indeed, In general, In fact, In the beginning, In the end and on and on. That was just page 1. The striking aspect of such writing: The author isn’t creating anything new, he’s simply gluing pre-fab phrases together. I suspect that many business clients are so accustomed to this sort of prose that they’ve given up hope of expecting better.

Orwell knew the difference. In Politics, he lists common tricks of lazy writers, i.e., those that prefer to manufacture pre-formed prose without the bother of thinking about it:

• Dying Metaphors: Worn out phrases, e.g., toe the line, stand shoulder to shoulder, ride roughshod over, play into the hands of, grist to the mill, Achilles’ heel, swan song. Authors who fill their pages with such drivel aren’t writing, they’re just typing.
• Artificial Verbal Limbs: Adding lengthy phrases to pad a sentence. Examples: render inoperative, play a leading role in, make contact with, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, and so on. Dead giveaway: Such phrases replace simple verbs.
• Fake Profundity: Using the “not un-” formation to make the banal sound important. Example, with passive tense thrown in: It is not untrue that executives are not unappreciative of the value of social media. Amid the double negatives, all sense is lost.
• Pretentious Diction: Any word or phrase that dresses up a simple statement without adding any real meaning — epoch-making, historic, unforgettable, age-old, inexorable, veritable.  Foreign words used to add an air of sophistication — deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo.
• Meaningless Words: romantic, plastic, human, living quality, natural, vitality, and even democracy, freedom, patriotic, realistic and justice. Orwell argues that such words carry multiple definitions depending on the author and audience, and thus have no precise, discoverable meaning.

The word from Orwell: If your writer’s work exhibits any of the above traits, he’s producing — and you’re accepting — rubbish.

Orwell had sound reasons for insisting on solid prose and excoriating anything less: As a man with strong political views and a keen eye for the discrepancy between the words and actions of leaders, he linked corrupt language with government malfeasance. “In our time,” he wrote, “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” an observation that applies equally well to our own era. Consider the actual intent of the following current phrases:

• “Nation building” [military intervention]
• “Troubled Asset Relief” [financial bail-out of the criminally inept]
• Forecasts of “greater operational efficiencies” [major layoff coming]

Like Orwell, I find it wise to apply an editor’s version of the Napoleonic code in such instances: All public statements, and their authors, are deemed guilty until proven innocent. Whenever the mighty pontificate, I look for the lie.

Orwell did hold out hope. He believed that writers could improve if they made the effort, and offered six guidelines for doing so. Because no writer — including this one — is immune to churning out bad prose in the name of expediency or some other evil, I return to Politics at least once a year for a refresher course.

Orwell’s Code for Creating Great Content:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I’d only quibble with rule #6.  Always say and write exactly what you think, barbarous or not. Glossing over the raw truth to make it more palatable is another abuse of the language — what Orwell would call the use of words to conceal and mislead rather than express. Orwell returned to this theme with the publication of 1984, where the state orders the lives of citizens through the manipulation of language. In Big Brother’s “Newspeak,” every word and phrase carries an intent other than its true meaning. “Barbarous” best defines the result: iron rule by the state.

In such a world, corrupt leaders retain authority with the full acquiescence of their subjects. The irony in today’s corporate environment: Many in power willingly accept, without question, sub-standard portrayals of their company — and pay for it. Wherever you find consensus on the deliberate misuse of language, mediocrity holds command.

Jim Crawford is the president of Crawford PR and author of Black Box Blog, an expert perspective on PR success.

Gawker is combining the best of the Web, print media and TV to create something unprecedented. To understand the magnitude of this earth-shaking event, hear Gawker’s explanation for the sudden shift. Caution: journalists and PR pros should be seated before reading the following. Everybody ready? Here goes –

• News drives traffic.
• Media should focus on big news stories.
• Ground-breaking precedent: Hire editors to figure out what’s big and what isn’t.
• Offer a variety of content for different audiences.
• Grab and keep their attention with great visuals.
• Like TV, offer regular “programming” keyed to ad opportunities.

A promo video on The New Gawker offers a glimpse of major news we can expect to see. Here are three top stories now featured:

1. A Prostitute’s Guide to Getting Into a Silvio Berlusconi Sex Party
2. Lindsay Lohan’s ‘Sober Shine Award’
3. Food Writer Ate Bear and Liked It

I don’t know about you, but I’m ditching the The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post this moment.

Okay, enough with the tongue in cheek. It’s great that Gawker is making the leap to news, and if other sites follow suit that’s a good thing.  I’ve never subscribed to the view that Web 2.0 signals the demise of “traditional media.”  Rather, just as we see with Gawker, new media are starting to do homage to the fundamentals of journalism. Nothing new here, not really. A similar thing happened 100+ years ago when yellow journalism evolved into the tabloid format.

We like Gawker’s return to the basics, to wit, recognition that: (1) big news is essential to traffic, or as we used to call it in a quainter era, “circulation”; (2) having a gatekeeper (editor) to prioritize stories and ensure quality control is not a bad idea; (3) graphics complement the news, pulling readers/viewers into the story; and (4) organizing departments around topics and planned themes helps attract readers and advertisers (maybe like that other anachronism that seems to be making a comeback — the editorial calendar).

What do these “changes,” such as they are, mean for companies that want to make a splash in new media?  Coupla points:

• Package Your News Intelligently. If Gawker’s move is the start of a trend, then using media rich announcements just got real important.  Tight prose. Keep releases to one page.  Use services like Business Wire EON to add links to short videos, blogs and other relevant content and images.
• Balance Your PR Act. When social media became the rage, many companies dove right in and in process started paying less attention to traditional news delivery. “Put it on the wire and forget about it” became a common unspoken motif. But now that the news is hot again, don’t do a 180 by abandoning company blogs, Twitter and Facebook. If you have something to say of value to audiences, your opinion via blog still matters. Just be judicious. And practical.
• Revive Editorial Calendar Pitching. Sure, why not? At some companies, following ed cals fell into disfavor because the resulting coverage featured multiple sources and nobody got to hog the article. So what? If it’s a major trend piece, do you really want to be the competitor that didn’t appear in the story?

Oops, gotta run. I’m working on a trio of major announcements: (1) NFL Star’s Private Video Escapades — Part II; (2)  “King of Pop” Reincarnated in Body of Next Dalai Lama; and (3) Crawford PR Announces the Sun Will Rise Tomorrow.” Clear the decks, Gawker.

What’s not so funny: Many professionals in virtually all fields including media relations are in complete denial about the role of random events.

Some of the most chilling examples occur in the world of finance.

Open any stock portfolio brochure to the two-page centerfold showing performance over the last 10, 20 or 30 years. The odds are that it shows a graph moving up and to the right with only the slightest downward variations — as the though the market “corrections” of 1987, 2000 and 2008 never occurred.  Reason for the omission: You’re looking at a Gaussian Bell curve, a statistical trick for showing “normal distributions” of events over time. In a Bell curve, losses and gains, advances and declines are averaged. The problem is that averages are meaningless.

Right up until the crash of 2008, leading Wall Street analysts, financial institutions and the Federal Reserve itself assured us that all was well. The statistical forecasting models on which they assessed risk looked fine & dandy.

One of the few Jeremiahs was a man named Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. Using sophisticated “monte carlo” software programs that spit out thousands of possible outcomes for a single event, Taleb discerned the mounting potential for a systemic financial crisis. Why most other experts missed it: a tendency toward what Taleb calls the “Ludic fallacy” (ludic being Latin for games) of basing studies of chance on models limited to known factors, as in “the narrow world of games or dice.”

In my years as a corporate PR executive and agency head, I’ve seen many a grand PR strategy based on similar models. Created in the waning months of the year, such plans were usually rendered outdated and meaningless by the second quarter of the following year by random events, either good or bad, that no one could have predicted. Perhaps the company made a major acquisition or was itself acquired, or received $billions in funding from a strategic investor, or took the world (and itself) by storm and surprise with a new product even its creators didn’t take that seriously at the outset. Alternately, negative outcomes could result from similar outcomes benefiting a competitor. All these events were random, and the company’s success or failure — and the publicity that resulted therefrom — hinged on real-time decisions not made to plan.

The current darling of the PR profession is the ROI plan for social media. As I write these words, hundreds of major companies are likely drafting plans that embrace social media for the coming year and attempt to pinpoint its ROI. If your enterprise is one such, mark your calendar for June 2011. Then go back and read your plan. Good luck with that.

There’s an old saying I like: “Lieutenants talk strategy — generals talk tactics.” Experience teaches us that businesses often rise or fall based on their rapid assessment of and brilliant execution on opportunities that, to corporate odds-makers, are random and “inconceivable.”  How you play that game is called tactics, and you won’t find any Hoyle’s rules for it in your business plan or PR ROI model.

Blog sprawl, as I call it, isn’t so much of a problem for small companies with a handful of regular bloggers who write on a few topics. But for Fortune 500 companies with multiple lines of businesses and dozens of bloggers, what begins with a few entries can over time turn into an unnavigable array of blogs hidden in the equivalent of cross-streets, back alleys and hen tracks.

Common examples of blog sprawl:

• Click on “blogs,” assuming you’ll be taken to multiple blogs, and in fact you find a single blogshack packed floor to ceiling with bloggers crawling over one another — it’s really only one blog.
• Look for “Company News” and it’s stuck in the corporate News Room, not in a blog at all. If the visitor’s aim is to follow company announcements, he or she must subscribe and receive them by email.  A simple RSS feed? — fugedaboutit.
• Seek out a great thought leadership commentary by the CEO and unless it went live that day it’s likely stuffed into a folder by month,  next to blogs by engineers and marketers who also posted then.

There are simple fixes you can undertake with your web consultant — be sure to grab him or her as this will involve re-architecting site navigation:

1. Home Page — If you have more than one blogger, it’s legitimate to promote “Blogs” on the home page with a link to your blog site. It’s misleading and confusing to say “blogs” on your home page then link to what’s really just multiple posts for one blog.
2. Segmentation — Create separate sections for each category of blog you plan to run: CEO Blog, Engineering Blog, Marketing Blog, whatever.  Categorize videos the same way — by topic and subject matter expert.  Do not throw all videos into one master “Video” section.
3. News — Make your company news a blog to help Google readily find your latest updated “news posts.”  Make it available by RSS so readers can sign up for the feed.

That’s for starters.  Follow these simple pointers and you’re well on your way to making blog posts as easy to find and follow as streets that run North-South or East West. More to come from Kate later, I’m sure.