The Rewards of Corporate Blogs
As I have covered in a prior posting, starting a corporate blog initiative has some risks but it can also have great rewards.
Just to be clear, my perspective is that any company that has a web presence and a traditional corporate website should have a comprehensive blog strategy. In the ideal world of unlimited resources, a company should:
Just to be clear, my perspective is that any company that has a web presence and a traditional corporate website should have a comprehensive blog strategy. In the ideal world of unlimited resources, a company should:
- Have a corporate blog, facilitated by someone in charge of external communication with contributions from various employees (managers and individual contributors)
- Encourage more personal employee blogs, published by individual willing to dedicate some time to it
- Regulate those with a policy or a set of guidelines
- Execute a set of marketing initiatives to promote their blog presence (cross linking, search engine submission, awards...)
- Evaluate various marketing campaigns to advertise on relevant blogs and RSS feeds
- Monitor what other bloggers are saying about them and engage a conversation with external bloggers covering them
- Leverage blog and wiki technologies for internal use to promote collaboration and information sharing
Here are some of the numerous rewards I can see of having a solid blog presence and strategy:
- Communicate the way an increasing number of customers want to consume information. Both from a technology perspective and from a tone and style one. A blog enables to start a real informal and personal conversation with your audience. It "feels" more like a one on one conversation with a name/face to it that a formal web site which typically "feels" like a brochure.
- Add yet another way to reach an important segment of your target market and create repetition.
- Target specific segments of your audience with specific messages. Think about "mini sites", each with a specific focus and tone for example.
- Create buzz about new products and gather input about them. GM FastLane blog does a good job at that [http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/].
- Try a new, different image. You don't have to follow the corporate guidelines; you can reinvent your self as cool, young, and sexy or add a tech spin to what you are doing.
- Drive the debate, engage your audience. A blog is an easy way to get feedback - even if you don't ask for it!
- Build trust by telling the truth and being more open about what you are thinking and doing.
- Increase the visibility of your brands in search engine by having more content about your brands published and more links to your corporate website. For example, well cross-linked blogs have the reputation to end-up high on the list of Google search results. For more explanation about Google search technology go to [http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/tech.html].
- Benefit from a rapid and easy way to announce news, changes, opinions, and perspectives.
- Engage your employees. You can really create some internal excitement by rewarding popular postings and making individual employees visible to the world.
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