Corporate Blogging: New marketing communication tool for companies.

How corporate blog does help the organizations? How can we benefit from promoting corporate blogging within our company?

Corporate blog: an official blog from a company, which signals that the blog is an official communications channel for the company.

Corporate blogging can help organization feel more human to the world and it is a way for company to become intertwined with the Internet community depending on organization and their business model. If corporate blog gains popularity, there could have thousands of people subscribing to the company feed. This can equate to instant success and popularity of company products. Actually, organization also may start to accepted use of blogging as a part of corporate policy. A corporate blog can be a tool that helps the organization fulfills a business goal. It is also a useful extension of the company image in the marketplace because there was no substitute for bad products or lack of commitment to customer. Besides, it is an opportunity to open a two-way channel between employees and customers. Employee can tell what their wants and needs to the organization and fight for their right as they can have more benefits in the organization. It helps organization have a new relationship with customers and build network because customer may communicate with organization communities unfiltered and promote the instant feedback helps the organization increase service quality. There are many positive outcomes that businesses can derive from adopting social media. Internet is humanizing and corporate blog may helps to humanize organization to customer. It can make the company have good reputation, likability and thus purchase consideration.

An example of corporate blog implementation and it’s effect.

Ex: Google

(http://googleblog.blogspot.com/)

Google blogs are one of the corporate blog which called Blogger in Google (BIG ). Google was successful in implemented the internet Web log system behind its firewall. Few years ago, Google already saw the fantastic benefits in the future by providing corporate blogging tools and expertise to interested clients. Google set up an internal blog for its employees shortly after acquiring the blogging service Blogger in early 2003 and its staffs found that internal blogs has many useful and creative ways. There were a lot of different uses of blogs within the firewall such as employees keeping track of meeting notes, sharing the problem solving information, snippets of code, and interaction within co-workers via company’s internal blogs.

Besides, it also helps intranet and internal base of documents growth. The officials of Google are around 619,000 RSS subscribers and the company has a very extensive blogroll. So, for Google it is growing interest among businesses towards blogs as business communication tools, especially among IT departments. There was because the command of IT organizations today is to do more with less, so the better they can communicate and share things, the more efficient their operations will be. So, there is a huge benefit in blogging for Google in implementing IT projects.

Nowadays, Google so successful in corporate blog so it has a great business idea about the opportunity in providing software and consulting to those companies interested in set up an internal Blogger version and needed it in the future. Google are competing head-to-head against enterprise document management products vendor and enterprise publishing software vendors if they really invest in these business. Corporate blog is going to be a growing trend over the next couple of years.

Pros and cons of corporate blogs:

Pros:

• Leaders can communicate directly with customers, suppliers and investors, as well as employees, helping disseminate and explain strategy.
• Blogs give the writer an opportunity to answer critics in a controlled forum.
• Compared with conference or printed memos to all staff, blogs are highly cost effective.
• A well written blog can give a human face to an otherwise anonymous corporation.

Cons:

• The best non-corporate blogs are spontaneous and genuine. Poorly written corporate blogs can look fake -- or perhaps worse, they reveal incompetence on he part of the writer.
• It is difficult for executives to write freely, particularly at listed companies where they are legally required to publish significant information to all investors at the same time.
• There is a risk that an ill-judged comment could be seized upon by the media or disgruntled investors.
• Negative comment
• Loss of control over message
• Neglect

How to start a corporate blog? Here are some steps show that how a corporate start a blog.

1. Identify what area of communications you want to improve.

· External communication

i. Brand awareness/Brand positioning

ii. Business development

iii. Issues management/lobbying

iv. Crisis communication

v. Media relations

vi. Recruitment marketing

vii. Customer support

viii. Reseller/dealer support

ix. Community relations

· Internal Communication

i. Knowledge management

ii. Sales support

iii. Project communication

2. Choose to start a corporate blog or to encourage an employee blog.

3. Should you start a group blog or an individual blog?

4. What geographic area should the blog cover (global or one country? What language should you use?

5. Company wide blog or blog per practice group, market unit, product group, industry sector?

6. Find employees who are good communicators and willing to spend the time posting on the blog.

7. Get the accept from CEO or whoever has the final say.

8. Create an editorial policy about who gets to blog, tone of voice, areas to cover, length and frequency of posts, information sources to cover, copyright aspects, target audience, do’s and dont’s.

9. Get accept from your IT department. They will worry about security and the risks of having several individuals post information live on a website. Get their help in selecting administration software and setting up the blog, domain, RSS feeds and tracking/measurement capabilities.

10. Create a corporate blog with the correct graphic profile according to your brand guidelines. Include biographies and photos of the bloggers.

11. Create an extensive list of information sources for the bloggers to cover in order to get information to comment on. Include official news sources, media, other blogs, press releases etc.

12. Give your bloggers access to a news aggregator so that they get the feel of RSS feeds and how it works.

13. Give your bloggers a list of blogs to read. Most people are not used to reading blogs and need to become familiar with blogging style writing and netiquette (linking policies etc).

14. Allow a trial period for some weeks, to be able to fine tune and make adjustments.

15. Start an RSS-feed and make the blog public.

16. Begin marketing your blog. List the blog in blog directories
Link to the blog in your email signature and from your corporate web page. Tell your customers and your employees. Don’t send out a press release about it, to get credit let blogs market your blog.

17. Evaluate, adjust and evaluate again.