Saturday, February 21, 2009

Corporate Blogging: A new marketing communication tool for companies?


Nowadays,coporate blogging is published and used by an organization to reach its organizational goals. By corporate blogging, its post and comments are easier to reach and follow due to centralized hosting and generally structured conversation threads. Thus,all current major browsers such as Safari, Opera, Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 are supported by RSS technology. It is where enables readers to easily read recent posts without actually visiting the blog and it is extremely useful for low-volume blogs. Typically, corporations use blogs to create a dialog with customers and explain features of their products and services. Examples for corporate blogging such as Dell, Amazon, Coca-cola and so on.


Many organizationuse use blogs with their user community. This allows them to share and preview product features, functions, and benefits before the products are released. Blogs are an excellent way to gather feedback and to make sure products meet the needs of users. Blogs have become the next generation marketing toll to corporate websites which merely post collateral and do not provide any interactive feedback. Thus, can interact with target market on a personal level by building a level of credibility and asking for their feedback on products and services.


Corporate blogging provide a clear mind map or editorial guidelines for overall marketing and communication strategy to its employees and third parties with organization communication plan and media mix. Besides that, its also encourage employee participation in contribution of expertise, free discussion of issues or topics and deal with it, collective intelligence, be a direct communication between various layers of an organization and shares their views with others employees, teams or spokepersons publicly. It can use to clarify the company's policies of the company and to react on public criticism on certain issues. Furthermore, on corporate blogging it can discuss news or promote the later softwares. The business world's posting pioneers say blogging helps them network, boost sales and even lobby. Many industries are now hiring full-time employees to amintain the company's blog.



There have 3 types of corporate blogs:

i. Internal blogs

-It is an access through the corporation's intranet.


-Any employee can view whilw many blogs are also communal, and allowing anyone to post to them.

-Used in lieu of meeting and e-mail discussions.


ii. External blogs

-It is a public available weblog.

-It has been used to announce new products and services, to explain qualify and policies, or react on public criticism on certain issues.

-Trough external blog it can interact with target market on a more personal level and also known as public relations tool.


iii. CEO blogs

-There are debates on whether CEOs should blog or not.

-Blogging between CEOs is becomes pouplar todays.



One of the advantages of corporate blogging is leaders can communicate directly with customers, suppliers, investors and employees, helping to disseminate and explain their strategy. It has opportunity to answer critics in a control forum. Thus, corporate blogging is in highly cost effective and the company can get immediate and fast feedback from others. Organizations, employees, communities and customers can sharing their ideas freely in an honest voice brings the blogging companies new connections and generate s trust. It si also give a human face to an otherwise anonymous enterprise. Besises that, it can be more accessible among the executives sinse the corporate blogging are an "unparalleled information gathering mechanism". Furthermore, it also support and promote organizational goals, narrow the power of distances. It helps project members keep each other updated without wasting time writng reports or searching the outlook inbox. If the blog has a positive effect on your company's reputation then it is very beneficial to your career.




However, it also exist of disadvantages of corporate blogging such as corporate blogging may hard to maintain due to time consuming and costly compare to starting level. The manager run the risk of being embarrassed, because information on a blog has not gone through filtering. Next disadvantage is workers warned or failed because of something they wrote, involved of create political problem within organization and cause employee less concentrate on their works. Thus, corporate blogging may regret of comments they made, for example an employee is very with another employee, and he let out his anger through the blog, after he whas calm down, he regret it. The important point is organization secrets will be disclose. This will cause management to worry aboput rumours. Beside that, stock market for publicly listed companies disclosure have legal department sweat for months to come.




In conclusion, corporate blogging commonly is a valuable marketing tool for a company. If the company want to create an effeciency and effectiveness corporate blog, they should put in more effort and improve for their organization. The important is the company need to maintain and control the company's blog, so that it will not be abused and damage the company's reputation.

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