Corporate Blogging: A new marketing communication tool for companies

A corporate weblog is published and used by an organization to reach its organizational goals.

Blogs are a good way to spread your message to your public—and to inform employees of company policies and activities.

So how does corporate blog helps the organizations??

● promote the sharing of information of work-related matters. Since blogs can be easily updated, they are used as a part of newsletters or company Intranets. This helps employees to keep themselves informed on all the current happenings in the organization. Blogs also allow employees to display their expertise on a particular topic, thereby becoming a recognized industry or subject "expert".

Example of the corporate blog implementation and its effect

Dell established a way for customers to share product development ideas through IdeaStorm. A core team looks at new ideas that come in, assesses them, and then figures out a way to incorporate those into the business. Dell has received about 9,000 ideas from the community, with over 600,000 comments. An example of one idea is getting Dell to integrate Linux. To show you how effective it was, Dell put out a survey and in 8.5 days received 100,000 responses from customers. Now customers are aware that they can influence product development at Dell and it's resulted in the development of a community of loyalists.

Pros of corporate blogs
● giving corporations and obscure brands the ability to connect with their audiences on a personal level, to build trust, collect valuable feedback and foster strengthened relationships

● conduct their public relations activities through blogging by posting press releases and updates about new company products and services on the blog

Cons of coporate blogs
● Some employees may use blogs to write negatively about the company, leading to bad publicity.

● There have been dozens of cases of workers warned or fired because of something they wrote on a blog

● Make many organizations look like disorganizations, with multiple tones and opinions. Contrary to what some might think, the average customer prefers it if the organization they are about to purchase from is at least somewhat coherent.



Top 6 corporate blog :-
#1. Google - Authority: 8492
#2. Adobe - Authority: 1797
#3. Flickr - Authority: 1744
#4. Facebook - Authority: 1478
#5. Yahoo! Search - Authority: 1130
#6. Dell - Authority: 799

Sources :~
http://mariosundar.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/top-15-corporate-blogs-ranked-may-2008/
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FWE/is_1_11/ai_n18743960
http://www.scottmonty.com/2008/03/corporate-blogging-how-pros-do-it.html
http://corporateblog.directtrafficmedia.co.uk/
http://intrafocus.wordpress.com/2007/01/18/is-blogging-really-good-for-my-company-or-just-a-buzz-word/
http://www.globalprblogweek.com/archives/how_to_launch_a_corp.php
http://www.morebusiness.com/running_your_business/businessbits/Corporate-Blogging-Secrets.brc