Corporate Blogging : A new marketing communication tool for companies

A corporate weblog is published and used by an organization in order to reach its organizational goals and nowadays it is widely used worldwide. The example of the corporate blog included internal, external and CEO Blogs. Currently, most of the browsers like 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 contains 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’s functions included providing 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.

Advantages ….

The advantage of blogs is that posts and comments are easy to reach and follow due to centralized hosting and generally structured conversation threads. Company blogs executed well build credibility and project a message of self-confidence. Examples of reasons to start a corporate blog would include; Employment Branding, Product Launch, Public Relations, Marketing Campaigns, Consulting Services, Vendor Relations, Media Relations, and Innovative Ideas used to established Industry Expertise.

Corporate blogging has become the new marketing communication tool for companies because it is a way of promoting about anything whether it may be public relations, marketing a new product, improving brand image and for research. Moreover, blog achieves the goal of growing a business because the company expands as it caters to online customers who may come across it. Blogs are a great tool of promoting a business; it can help in interacting with users and display their feedback. When other people view the testimonials made by customers themselves, they will be satisfied as they know that the company is listened to their comments.

Furthermore, corporate blog also is a form of advertising for companies because customer will seek there again and again. Indirectly, there has become an advertisement to the customers. There is a variety of information available in the blog. Therefore, a successful marketing through blogs creates or enters an area of interest where the readers are known the products or services. Finally, the corporate blogging as a success communication tool because company may do public speaking, to build trustworthiness for themselves and boost up their company’s credentials. Blogging has become a new less time consuming and less expensive way to reach potential and current customers.

Disadvantages …

Corporate blogging might easily involved in 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.