Monday, June 23, 2008

New marketing tools for companies!Corporate Bloggin!

Wikipedia:
“A corporate blog is a weblog published and used by the organization to reach the organizational goals. Although there are many different types of corporate blogs, they are mostly categorized as either external or internal corporate blogs”


1. Company Blog

This is the most common form of the company blog. IMO, the corporate blog is definitely the next stage in the evolution of the corporate website. Examples: There are so many examples to choose from include: Google, Adobe, Flickr, Facebook, and Yahoo! Search.

2. Industry Blog

This is an interesting type of corporate blog one that we should beware of, because it places some difficult ethical choices for the company at hand. This is definitely not an advisable strategy for every company but should be considered an option if you consider yourself or employees in your organization as thought leaders in your respective field/technology and choose to establish a blog to discuss best practices.

3. Department or Product Blog

Department blog is another common style or kind of blogging, which is very popular and ultimately essential for large organizations.

4. CEO Blog

The most famous example would have to be the blog of Jonathan Schwartz, CEO at Sun Microsystems. He sets such a stellar example for other CEO to blog even he is busy with his schedules.



There are advantages and disadvantages in corporate blogging;

Advantages:

  • Blogs have one publisher who controls what is published on the blog
  • Comments from readers can be pre-screened and even blocked (i.e. not published) if they are deemed inappropriate
  • Good blogs have a distinctive voice and personality
  • That voice tends to make good reading and to invite a real "conversation" with reader
  • A blog gathers steam, gains traction and can get better and richer over time
  • Blog entries are easily searchable (by date and category/topic)
  • Individual blog posts are findable on Google (each has its own unique URL)
  • RSS (i.e. a Web feed) is a highly efficient way to read updates to a blog
  • Blogs don't require registration and logging in (a stumbling block - or an irritant - for some users)
  • Blogs can host other (compelling) forms of social media, including video clips and podcasts

Disadvantages:

  • Blogs can make company problems public
  • Lose control your company's message
  • Company to lose valuable customers - Misleading advertisement
  • No confidentiality - A third party’s trade secrets may be accidentally disclosed, breaching a confidentiality agreement, which could be costly and could affect a company’s reputation

Lets take streething.com as an example,

In this blog, they offer insights of the local Asian streetwear culture. They develop & support the streetwear scene with information, events and updates. This helps a lot to market their company and their business.

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