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Corporate Blogging: A new marketing communication tool for companies

Posted by PIRATES in UTAR on 5:25 AM in

What is corporate blogging? Corporate blogging is a new marketing communication tool, called weblog that used and published by an organization to reach its strategic/organizational goals. Currently, most of the browsers (supported by RSS technology) such as Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer enables readers to easily read the posts that recently posted by organization without visiting the blog directly. There three type of corporate blog which are external, internal and CEO Blogs.


  • Internal Blogs
    As its name, it is a blog that can view by employees of the organization through accessed the organization’s Intranet. The blog is communal and just allow the employees to post any comment to the blog. This can encourage employee to participate in free discussion of issues; direct communication between various layers of an organization and collective intelligence. By this, employees will have a sense of community and more commitment toward organization.

    Besides, it can also be used in
    e-mail discussions and meeting, especially for those stay in different locations or have conflicting schedules. It also can attract those individuals who may not aware or visited, to take part in the discussion to contribute their knowledge and expertise.

  • External Blogs
    An external blog is
    weblog that is available publicly where organization’s employees, spokespersons or teams can share their views. It is used to explain and clarify policies, to announce new products or services, to react on public criticism on particular issues, or to announce new research and development in products to improve brand and organizational image. It is like an informal press release, allows a window to the organizational culture and allows any comments to be made to the posts. It can seen that the external blogs can provides a more honest and direct view about the organization than traditional communication channels, however, they are one type of public relations tools and may be biased.


  • CEO Blogs
    Blogging among CEOs is becoming popular nowadays although there are some debates on whether CEOs have to blog or not.


Corporate blogging has become the new marketing communication tool for companies because it is a way of promoting relating to the products/services of the companies. (The posts and comments can reach and follow easily through generally structured conversation threads and centralized hosting.)

Moreover, it can be more accessible by executives since the corporate blogging are an “
unparalleled information gathering mechanism”. It can reduce the costs for the organizations in searching and gathering ideas and thoughts through the blogs.

The organizations also can decrease the time in responding to employees’ or customers’ valuable and important enquiries and feedback. They can view the blogs immediately after the comments/enquiries/feedbacks being posted and interacting with customers/employees more efficiency. Through corporate blogging, customers’/employees’ satisfaction will increase as they know that their comments are concerned by the organization.

Furthermore, corporate blogging is a
form of advertising for companies because customers will review and go through the blog frequently to update themselves with the new information of the companies. This has become an advertisement to customers
indirectly because variety of information available in the blogs. It makes the companies easy to meet potential customers and increase their sales. Through corporate blogging, organizations are also able to enhance the trustworthiness and boost up their credentials. This is why it has become a success marketing communication tool for the companies.


However, by using corporate blogging, there are several risks for the companies. Corporate blogging might make it easy to
breach information security; defamation and invasion of privacy; and loss of company confidentiality. Besides, customers/employees will expect that the companies will update the blog regularly. However, to writing a blog, companies have to spending more time and incur more costs to it which may cause the companies to incur about $800billion in productivity every year. It is very costing for the companies.

In conclusion, the corporate blogging is a very successful communication tool in delivering the message/information of the companies since it has brought more benefits even though the risks come along with it. Thus, the companies have to maintain corporate blogging by eliminating the potential risks in order to communicate effectively with their customers and employees.

The followings are the top 15 popular Corporate blogs [Tachnorati ranked]- May 2008

15 Most Popular Corporate Blogs (Technorati ranked) – May 2008
#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
#7.
Digg – Authority: 641
#8.
LinkedIn – Authority: 591
#9.
Ask – Authority: 364
#10.
General Motors – Authority: 364
#11.
Yahoo! – Authority: 297
#12.
Delta – Authority: 252
#13.
Kodak – Authority: 105
#14.
Monster – Authority: 73
#15.
Boeing – Authority: 67
Source:
New PR Wiki, provides the listing of corporate blogs.






For more information about corporate blogging, can visit following website:
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/08/08/15-companies-that-really-get-corporate-blogging/
http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/28/news/companies/pluggedin_fortune/index.htm http://www.socialtext.net/bizblogs/index.cgi?fortune_500_business_blogging_wiki



Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_blog
http://mariosundar.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/top-15-corporate-blogs-ranked-may-2008/


3 Comments


woh...google is top 1 most popular corporate blogs...great to know this...


besides blogging, nowadays some company also use facebook and twitter to keep their customer updated... like Airasia, Malaysia Airlines...


Ya...thanks your additional information...

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