Sunday, July 12, 2009

Corporate Blogging: A new marketing communication tool for companies

Nowadays, corporate blogging is used by an organization to reach its organizational goals and published. Besides that, corporate blogging advantage is that posts and comments are easy to reach and follow due to centralized hosting and generally structured conversation threads. For example, all major browsers including Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer 7 support RSS technology. It can visit the blog without actually visiting and enables readers to easily read recent posts. Moreover, it is very useful for low-volume blogs. In addition, corporate blogging have a lot of types, but most can be categorized as either external or internal.

How does the corporate blog help the organization?

Corporate blogging is a new marketing communication tools for companies. It can offer the ability to build a community and can interact with your organization and each others. It can through comments and out-of-the-box widgets, blog catalog, social bookmarking sites, cross linking and cross posting to get people interact with your organization and each others. Besides that, corporate blogging can also build a community within own organization. It gives the opportunity for your staff members to bring out their stories, and make them feel part of your organization’s community.

Meanwhile, corporate blogging help the organization ease of publishing. It allow organization publish information to public much faster than a traditional website. Therefore, it offers an easy-to-update, easy-to-work with contents management system (CMS).


For instance, General motor is a great example of corporate blogging because GM has clearly realized that regurgitating press releases is not what blogs are made for. GM corporate blog mainly is talks a lot on their blog about their cars and trucks and the design choices they make while creating them, but they also throw in interesting treatises on current hot-button issues, such as alternative energy.



Therefore, there are some advantages of corporate blogging:

• Blogs give the writer an opportunity to answer critics in a controlled forum.
• Leaders can communicate directly with customers, suppliers and investors, as well as employees, helping disseminate and explain strategy.
• Sharing their ideas freely in an honest voice brings the blogging companies new connections and generates trust which will lead to business opportunities galore.
• Blogs have a broad impact on the nature of online media by giving an opportunity to publish words, pictures and ultimately - multimedia to the web without specialized geek skills.
• They boost your search engine rankings if you add fresh content on a regular basis. Google and other search engines rewards sites that are updated often, that link to other sites and most importantly, that has many inbound links.
• People are far more likely to give great feedback if they know someone specific is listening. The power of these feedback loops can generate big benefits.
• Customers mark your company as authentic and forward-looking.
• Being informal, blogs can provide you with a measure of value. Publish an idea and see if it generates interest.
• If your blog has a positive effect on your company’s reputation then it is very beneficial to your career.

However, there is also having some disadvantages of corporate blog:



• It can be tricky to drag public comment out of a company without first routing through the sanitizing filter of a press office.
• There is a risk that an ill-judged comment could be seized upon by the media or disgruntled investors.
• Poorly written corporate blogs can look fake or perhaps worse, they reveal incompetence on the part of the writer.
• Blogs are easy to start and hard to maintain. Writing coherently is one of the most difficult and time-consuming tasks for a human being to undertake. So, far from blogs being a cheap strategy, they are a very expensive one, in that they eat up time. As a result, many blogs are not updated, thus damaging rather than enhancing the reputation of the organization.



References:

  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_blog
  2. http://www.blogtips.org/does-your-non-profit-organisation-need-a-blog/
  3. http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/08/08/15-companies-that-really-get-corporate-blogging/
  4. http://www.enterpriseblogs.info/corporate-blogging/advantages
  5. http://www.enterpriseblogs.info/corporate-blogging/disadvantages

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