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:

• 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:

1. 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.
2. Add yet another way to reach an important segment of your target market and create repetition.
3. Target specific segments of your audience with specific messages. Think about "mini sites", each with a specific focus and tone for example.
4. Create buzz about new products and gather input about them. GM FastLane blog does a good job at that [http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/].
5. 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.
6. Drive the debate, engage your audience. A blog is an easy way to get feedback - even if you don't ask for it!
7. Build trust by telling the truth and being more open about what you are thinking and doing.
8. 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].
9. Benefit from a rapid and easy way to announce news, changes, opinions, and perspectives.
10. Engage your employees. You can really create some internal excitement by rewarding popular postings and making individual employees visible to the world.