Corporate Blogging: A New Marketing Communication Tool For Companies

Today, corporate blogging is widely used and published by an organization to achieve its organizational goals through internal, external and CEO Blogs. Thus, all current browsers which include Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer 7 enable readers to read the recent posts easily without truly visit the blog through supporter of RSS technology. According to research of NewPR Wiki, there was 58 (11.6%) of the Fortune 500 were blogging as of 17/5/2008. One of the successful blogs is Amazon Web Services Blog by Amazon.com that about Amazon web services, products, tools and developer information. It helps to improve the communication and its customer services, attract more people to consume and discuss new products online.

Corporate blogging provides a clear mind map or editorial guidelines of overall marketing or communication strategy to its employees and third parties with organization communication plan and media mix. Besides that, it encourages 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 spokespersons publicly. Furthermore, it can be used to announce new products and services, explain and clarify policies of the company and to react on public criticism on certain issues. Business blog can interact with a target market on a personal level by building a level of credibility and asking for their feedback on products and services.

One of the pros of corporate blogging is posts and comments are easy to reach and follow by employees due to centralized hosting and generally structured conversation threads. Besides that, it can be more accessible among the executives since the corporate blogging are an “unparalleled information gathering mechanism”. Furthermore, a search able archive of thoughts and ideas can be created and jotting down within an hour through corporate blogging that cost more cheaper than other ways. Lastly, executives can receive the important information from employees and customers’ questions and feedback that will be permanently recorded on the blog and increases the efficiency while decreases the time wasted on needless e-mails.

However, corporate blogging might make it easy for defamation and invasion of privacy or to breach information security and loss of company confidentiality. (Wired News, 2005) Hence, this fear has stopped 22 percent of employees from writing a corporate blog. Besides that, it will create an expectation of updating the blog regularly and the time that taken in writing a blog will cause loss of $ 759 billion in productivity every year. Additionally, a new style of communication will be mastered since corporate blogging become popular in these recent years. In conclusion, corporate blogging is getting important for corporation to deliver the message privately or publicly since it has brought many pros even thought the cons come along with it.

References:

http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/28/news/companies/pluggedin_fortune/index.htm
http://www.thenewpr.com/wiki/pmwiki.php/Resources/CEOBlogsList
http://mariosundar.wordpress.com/2008/05/19/the-5-types-of-corporate-blogs-with-examples/
http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/06/30/most-corporate-blogs-are-unimaginative-failures/