Fortune 500 Blog Review: Harrah’s Entertainment

Harrahs EntertainmentOkay, I shall continue with my blog review for the Fortune 500 Blogs Project, and today I will be investigating on Harrah’s Entertainment!

Harrah’s operates casinos and hotels, so the front line people do have direct contact with their customers, unlike the auto manufacturers or manufacturers of products like shampoo … or the likes where the company is mainly involved in production, leaving the retailers and dealers to do the main sales and interaction.

So does Harrah’s Entertainment have a corporate blog? Lets find out!

Let’s start from their company website!

Searching for blogs… Nope! No blogs! They don’t even have a search box in their website. Argh.

Next search! Google!

site:harrahs.com blog – nothing.

Searching… searching… nope. No sign of corporate blogs.

Some interesting results though, about people saying stuff in their blogs relating to Harrah’s

  1. CIO Weblog talking about Harrah’s CRM strategy
  2. Las Vagas blog has an article of advice to Harrah’s stockholders
  3. The Creative-Weblogging network of blogs has a blog Gambling-Weblog.com that has published quite a few articles on Harrahs, like their effort to help problem gamblers.

Apart from that.. nope. Well, there are a few entries which are those spammy looking blogs. Shan’t list them here.

Google Blog Search

A lot of “poker news”, “casino news” and “gambling news” blogs that talk about the things going on in Harrahs like articles on Harrah’s buyout and Harrah’s Announcing 2007 WSOP Dates, but nope, no sign of corporate blogs.

It seems that something is brewing at Harrahs regarding a buyout. Here’s an excerpt which I got from the About.com page:

The Wall Street Journal reported that Harrah’s Entertainment, the partent company of the Harrah’s casinos, had received a buyout offer from Apollo Management and Texas Pacific Group to acquire the casino operator for $81 a share in cash.

Just news which stock investors would be concerned about…

Anyway… On to Technorati

Nothing again. Some blogs about their trip to Las Vegas.

Well, I guess that’s it. No corporate blogs, no employee blogs found.

How could Harrah’s have benefited from a corporate blog?

I think two major stake holders for Harrah’s (like any other public listed company) are their customers, and stockholders.

The Harrah’s website is doing a pretty good job for customers – having a casino locator, reservations and stuff like that. Harrah’s also has a loyalty program called Total Rewards, and I believe that is the primary way in which the company gets in touch with their loyal customers. (Anyone with any experience to share on this?)

For shareholders – there are plenty of sites talking about HET shares, like Google Finance, and also plenty of blogs too. They are managing their investors well too, with their section of website for investor relations. They do have some financial press releases, and they do come in RSS feeds.

I think a corporate blog could help people who are not in their rewards program. Maybe they could publish updates on the recent changes to their casino machines, or gather feedback on their experience at their casinos? A corporate blog could also put a more friendly feel for investors, to give them updates in a friendlier voice rather than press releases.

How and what else would Harrah’s do with a corporate blog?

Comments

  1. Hello! Where’re your search box? I was trying to search for a post to link to and have to look through your tags and actually had some fun doing guessing game. I found what I was looking after 2 incorrect guess. 😉

  2. Hahaha!! Ya man! I’m talking about others not having search boxes when mine cannot be found. 😛 Mine’s all the way to the bottom of every page. I forgot to shift it up after I made changed the main page to display > 1 post again.

    Noted! Will change!