Key aspects of corporate blogging

Corporate BloggingSince I’ve bought so many books, I’d better dive into corporate blogging straight away!

We all know about corporate blogging, but what are the key aspects that make blogs so powerful in helping companies, big and small?

Big Corporations

Most big corporations use an IT department or the likes that manage the website of the company. This is to ensure that the right technically trained people are put in charge to take care of the technicalities behind the website, may it be just an information website, or a powered portal that enables e-commerce. While this implementation is good, it slows down the time to publish.

Blogs gives an excellent advantage because it gives the power of instant publishing right to the non-technical guy (the CEO!) sitting behind a computer screen. The setting up of the blog can be done by the IT department, and that is a one time process, but subsequent updates and posts can be done by the CEO himself.

This not only lets the blogger (whether its the CEO or some other designated blogger) talk to the public instantly, but because of the very “personal voice” nature of blogs, invites feedback from the public through comments.

The powerful feedback feature of blogs can also help big corporations test drive their new ideas, and gather feedback directly from the customers. For example, an auto manufacturer like General Motors might not have much opportunity to really meet their customers in real life and get feedback from them, because of the nature of the business and the distribution channels. (I assume their dealers are the ones that do the interacting with customers most of the time.) Using a corporate blog (GM Blogs) bridges this gap! Using this blog, GM can post about their development of any new models and ask for input and feedback from the customers – what they want improved!

Small Corporations

The main concern for most small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is one word – marketing! And, blogs are an excellent medium for marketing and reaching out to people via the Internet!

Of course, the first thing is the global reach – and you may argue that a normal website can do that similarly as well! But let me bring this back to the issue of technicalities – a small startup may not even have the resources to get the technical people to do up a website! And its really true, I’ve seen some sites out there from SMEs that are quite horribly designed, with broken links, missing images and all! Totally ruins the professional image of the company, IMHO.

The great thing about blogs are that they are built from templates! To set up a blog, just create an account at Blogger.com and you can get your blog up in less an hour of work for Internet amateur, or 5 mins for the Internet savvy! While the default templates may not look unique, at least they look professional and pleasant – much better than many SMEs out there! Using the blog administration interface to update the content is also much friendlier than dealing with the raw HTML codes.

Pitstop Cafe is a great example of one board game cafe in Singapore that use a blogspot address for their website, and its been around for almost a year. They have their template changed from the original ones by blogger – very nice and very well done!

And the best part – hosting on blogspot is free! Putting aside the debate of having your own domain name, isn’t that a wonderful package for a startup company?

More on marketing and building brand awareness.

I talked about Google loving blogs just yesterday. Blogs are a great way to build content, which automatically means marketing for companies.

For most blogging engines, each post automatically becomes a single page (permalink) for the article, so just by writing a short and good articles everyday or maybe three times a week, a company can quickly build pages and pages of content for the search engine to index, and build credibility in the industry they are dealing in. To add to that, if the blogger works on the social aspects of blogging and links to relevant sites, this blog will really bring in traffic, which eventually boils down to a better brand awareness!

Of course, there are a lot of other areas in which blogs can help companies, like highlighting success stories with your products, or instant communication during a crisis, but I think these highlighted above are really the key aspects, the ones which really make the big difference!

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