In these modern time, there are more and more organization start using Corporate Blogging. Whether internal or external, blogs are not strange to the corporate world. A corporate weblog is advertised and used by an organization to achieve its organizational objectives. The corporate weblog enable others more convenient to find those posts and comments and follow due to centralized hosting and generally structured conversation threads. With different types of web browsers, such as Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer 7, RSS technology are supported, which allow readers to read recent post without visiting the actual blog, which is beneficial to low-volume blogs.
There are many different types of corporate blogs. However, they can be categorized into 2 sectors, which are internal and external blogs.
(i) An Internal Blog is mostly accessed through the organization's intranet, is a weblog that provided to employees of the firm. Besides that, many blogs are published as public to allow anyone can access and post to them. The informal nature of job may encourage the participation of employee and it allows free discussion of any issues. Morever, it's a way of collective intelligence and provide direct communication between various hierarchies of an organization.
(ii) An External Blog is blog that allows company employees, teams or spokesperson to share their view publicly. It's also used by company to promote new product and services, to explain and simplified company policies, or to response on public criticism on certain issues. Furthermore, it also provide transparency of a company culture and treated more informally than traditional press releases. In some corporate blog, those posts need to go through a review before they post it. Some other corporate blog, they allow outsiders to leave comment to the posts.
When done correctly, blogging can be extremely valuable to a company. There are several benefits for corporate blogging:
(a) Blogs build and brands your company to be a thought leader in your industry. People always think a lot everyday. However, they are less people will take time to record these thoughts. Record the business thoughts on the corporate blog will force you to think even harder about yout industry. If you think hard enough and work regarding to your idea that you thought yesterday, can be sure that you find the success way for your company.
(b) Blogs help to engage customers in conversation and help in building relationships with them. Relationship marketing is important. The more trust and familiarity between 2 parties will result in higher posibility of a transaction.
(c) Blogs help you to show to the world that you have nothing to hide. There is nobody like to deal business with someone who always keep dark secrets and refuse to disclose anything. Not saying that a business can't have any secrets. Business secret are necessary and should be well kept with appropraite staff education and a proper blogging policy. Blogging will help a corporate to show to its stakeholder that you have nothing to hide against them, and to show that you are not trying to cheat their money. This will help a corporate to build trust in society.
(d) Blogs help you to get feedback from customer towards company's services. It can be a direct communications channel to get response from customers. Blogs provide a way that for you to get feedback from customers and understand with their need. With a global reach through internet, it also allow you to have more time with your customers, so you can provide services which customer prefer with. Then they will leave a good comment on the blog and this help to build good image for the company.
Like everything else in the world, blogging also has its disadvantages to be used:(I) Need to remember that blogging will lead to sharing of information about individual or company, which will be harmful for employee or the company in general due to unappropriate use of information by employees or outsider.
(II) Blogging can lead to a legal pitfalls. If the comments make by some employees in the corporate blog that negatively affected others, company will be responsible for it.
(III) Blogging can be harmful too because some employees may use corporate blog to express their dissatisfaction about the company and this will lead to a bad publicity and bad reputation of company toward society.
(IV) Like everything elso in internet, blog are easy to start but difficult to maintain. Writing corporate blog coherently is difficult and time-consuming for a person to undertake it during free time. As a result, many blog are not updated according to what actual have been happened, this will lead to harm a company's reputation rather than enhancing it.
References:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_blog
2. http://www.blogopreneur.com/2007/03/30/the-benefits-of-corporate-blogging/
3. http://www.enterpriseblogs.info/corporate-blogging/disadvantages
4. http://www.morebusiness.com/running_your_business/businessbits/Corporate-Blogging-Secrets.brc
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