Sunday, August 2, 2009

• Corporate Blogging: A new marketing communication tool for companies.

A corporate webblog 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.

Generally, organization blogs can be classified into 2 types:

Internal

&

External
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Internal Blogs

Internal blogs are basically are inter corporation blogs via access through intranet of the company.
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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
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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
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Corparate blogs are a norm nowadays for most of the companys. However, the blog may brings some few impacts towards the company.

The following are the advatage of corporate blogging

  1. Leaders can communicate directly with customers, suppliers and investors, as well as employees, helping disseminate and explain strategy.
  2. Blogs give the writer an opportunity to answer critics in a controlled forum
  3. A well written blog can give a human face to an otherwise anonymous enterprise
  4. Sharing their ideas freely in an honest voice brings the blogging companies new connections and generate trust which will lead to business opportunities galore

The disadvatages are as followed:

  1. Like practically everything else on the Web blogs are easy to start and hard to maintain. Writing coherently is one of the most difficult and time-consuming tasks for a human being to undertake.
  2. There is a risk that an ill-judged comment could be seized upon by the media or disgruntled investors
  3. Blogs make many organizations look like disorganizations, with multiple tones and opinions. Contrary to what some might think, the average customer prefers it if the organization they are about to purchase from is at least somewhat coherent