Corporate blog

A corporate weblog is published and used by an organization to reach its organizational goals. The advantage of blogs is that posts and comments are easy to reach and follow due to centralized hosting and generally structured conversation threads.

Although there are many different types of corporate blogs, most can be categorized as either external or internal.

Types of corporate blogs

Internal blogs

An internal blog, generally accessed through the corporation's Intranet, is a weblog that any employee can view. Many blogs are also communal, allowing anyone to post to them. The informal nature of blogs may encourage:

• employee participation
• free discussion of issues
• collective intelligence
• direct communication between various layers of an organization
• a sense of community

Internal blogs may be used in lieu of meetings and e-mail discussions, and can be especially useful when the people involved are in different locations, or have conflicting schedules. Blogs may also allow individuals who otherwise would not have been aware of or invited to participate in a discussion to contribute their expertise.^[1]

External blogs

An external blog is a publicly available weblog where company employees, teams, or spokespersons share their views. It is often used to announce new products and services (or the end of old products), to explain and clarify policies, or to react on public criticism on certain issues. It also allows a window to the company culture and is often treated more informally than traditional press releases, though a corporate blog often tries to accomplish similar goals as press releases do. In some corporate blogs, all posts go through a review before they are posted. Some corporate blogs, but not all, allow comments to be made to the posts.

External corporate blogs, by their very nature, are biased, though they can also offer a more honest and direct view than traditional communication channels. Nevertheless, they remain public relations tools.

Corporate blogs may be written primarily for consumers (Business-to-consumer) or primarily for other businesses (B2b). Certain corporate blogs have a very high number of subscribers. The official Google Blog is currently in the Technorati top 50 listing among all blogs worldwide. The number of subscribers, blog comments, links to blog posts, and the number of times a post is shared in other social media are indicators of a blog's popularity, potential influence, and reach. While business blogs targeted to consumer readers may have a high number of subscribers, comments, and other measures of engagement; corporate blogs targeted to other businesses, especially those in niche industries, may have a very limited number of subscribers, comments, links, and sharing via social media. Accordingly, other metrics are often evaluated to determine the success and effectiveness of B2B blogs^[2]

Marketers might expect to have product evangelists or influencers among the audience of an external blog. Once they find them, they may treat them like VIPs, asking them for feedback on exclusive previews, product testing, marketing plans, customer services audits, etc.^[3]

The business blog can provide additional value by adding a level of credibility that is often unobtainable from a standard corporate site. The informality and increased timeliness of information posted to blogs assists with increasing transparency and accessibility in the corporate image. Business blogs can interact with a target market on a more personal level while building link credibility that can ultimately be tied back to the corporate site.

While some corporate blogs are hosted on consumer blogging platforms, like Tumblr and Blogger, others are hosted on business blogging platforms, like Compendium.

A list of externally available corporate blogs is available at The NewPR/Wiki.

Popularity

Whether external or internal, blogs are not new to the corporate world. More than 12% of the Fortune 500 companies blog^[4] externally.

Market research done in the first half of 2006 indicated that 34% of large companies had established weblogs. Another 35% planned to do so by the end of 2006, thus bringing the total to nearly 70%.^[5]

External links

• On the Structure, Properties and Utility of Internal Corporate Blogs
• The New Rules of Business Blogs e-book by Linas Simonis (discusses how a corporate blog is different from a business blog)
• FT ComMetrics Global 500 blog index
• Corporate Blogging Tips Site from the authors of Corporate Blogging for Dummies dedicated to providing tips and information regarding corporate blogging best practices.

References

1. ^ Fernández Dutto, C. (September 19th, 2005)Internal blogs: How to design powerful conversations that open possibilities for action and collaboration within blogs
2. ^ De Young, G. (April 20th, 2010) Meaningful Metrics for B2B Blogging.
3. ^ Céré, J. (September 21st, 2005) Consumer Generated: from Mayhem to Marketing.
4. ^ Anderson C. and Mayfield R. Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki
5. ^ JupiterResearch, (June 26, 2006) JupiterResearch Finds That Deployment of Corporate Weblogs Will Double in 2006

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