Corporate blogging

Corporate blogging is a new market communication tool for companies. It helps the organization to reach their goal. The advantage of blogs is that posts and comments are easy to reach and follow due to centralized hosting and generally structured conversation threads. There are two kind of corporate blog which is internal and external blog.

An internal blog is a weblog which enable employee to view. Generally it accessed through the corporation's Intranet while an external blog is a publicly available weblog where company employees, teams, or spokespersons share their views. It is often used to announce new products and services, to explain and clarify policies, or to react on public criticism on certain issues. It also allows a window to the company culture and is often treated more informally than traditional press releases, though a corporate blog often tries to accomplish similar goals as press releases do.

From a business perspective there are several potential reason to blog. The kind you can expert from blogs is mainly about stronger relations with important target groups.

Become the Expert
Position yourself and your company as the thought leader of your business.

Customer Relationships
In a forum where your main objective not is to sell, you'll have a more personal relationship between you and your customers. Blogs are a fast way to join the customers' discussions, provide tips and insights or receive feedback.

Media Relations
It's every PR-consultants dream to create a channel where media regularly check what you have to say, instead of media just being passive - sometimes indifferent - recipients of press releases.

Internal Collaboration
Use blogs as a workspace where project members keep each other updated without wasting time writing reports or searching the Outlook inbox.

Knowledge Management
Blogs works in two ways. First of all, they're an easy way for the readers to find information and resources they want or need. That's obvious and could be used internally in many organizations. Second, blogs are a kind of "university light" for the blogger. Blogging is on-the-job learning.

Recruitment
If you establish your company as a thought leader, people in your business will pay attention. They'll read and discuss what you have to say. Chances are good they will see you as an attractive employer.

Test ideas or products
A blog is informal. It's part of a conversation where people (often) can comment, and the blog can provide you with a measure of value. Publish an idea and see if it generates interest. Does anyone link to you? What do they say?

Rank high in search engines
Well, this has nothing to do with relations. But Google and other search engines rewards sites that are updated often, that link to other sites and most importantly, that has many inbound links. Start a blog at your regular site and your ranking will boost.


However, there is also disadvantage of using blogging. Sometime customers are not trust the corporate blogging. If company fail to do so, they gain no more advantages. The statistic below show that how much the customer trust to the information sources. The corporate blogging is the lowest which is 16 %.


sorces from Read Write Web


There is some sucessful example of corporate blogging like Coca-Cola, Dell, Intel, Nokia and so fourth. They have implement their blog sucessful and build up a strong relationship with customers.

Related Links:
(1) Report of corporate blog not trust.

(2) Top 15 corporate blog (may 2008)