Harvard Business School Blog – 500,000 Subscribers

Harvard Business Publishing, a subsidiary of Harvard Business School, manages the HBS blog with 500,000 subscribers worldwide and tens of thousands of pages on the site with new content posted daily.

Success Factors

  1. You can’t overlook their secret weapon – content creators – some of the smartest people in the world work for the HBS blog.  If you take that variable out of the equation I don’t know if they would have 500,000 subscribers – statistics show it would be closer to 500 or less if you compare it to similar blogs lacking in great content creators.  Leads us to the saying, “Content Is King.”  I don’t believe that.  I think – great content creators who are gifted in storytelling is King.
  2. The HBS content creators are given tools (SharePoint) to manage new content during the create and edit process.  I would not recommend SharePoint.  There are so many other more robust and less costly tools for editorial management of content available.  I like DivvyHQ for a paid system or for free, I created one you are welcome to try out on Google docs - click here.
  3. All content creators are given guidelines on how to communicate – the persona, voice, tone, personality are all outlined but at the core they are encouraged to be storytellers not bloggers.
  4. Leverage – they always think about how many channels a single piece of content can be re-purposed on.  If it can’t, they don’t create the content.
  5. They are good at broadcasting (pushing) their message on social media channels.
  6. They use social media to listen to conversations around keywords – primarily “entrepreneurship” to find ways to then push their content to channels that are talking about what they write.
  7. Then, they monitor spikes in conversations around the world in those keyword areas to see if the HBS content is floating to the top of conversations.

What They Are Not Good At

They are not good at the “social” part of social media.  They do not have a team in place to quickly and regularly communicate back to the hundreds of thousands of people trying to reach out and talk to them.

To read the entire case study go here.