Corporate Blogging: A New Marketing Communication Tool for Companies

What is coporate blogging?
According to the wikipedia, the corporate blog is corporate web log that published and used by an organization to reach its organizational goals thought the internal blog or external blog or even the CEO blog. Readers can easily read recent posts without actually visiting the blog with the browsers such as Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer 7 that support the RSS technology.

How the corporate blog help the organizations?
Corporate blog is useful in encourage the employee participation in the discussion and contribute their expertise, explain and clarify policies, react on public criticism on certain issues or free discussion of issues, collective intelligence from employee, direct communication between various layers of an organization, and finally increase a sense of community.

According to the website, Top 15 Corporate Blog ranked in the May 2008, the Google’s blog is the most popular blog, follow by Adobe’s blog and Flickr’s blog as the 2th and 3th.



Google Incorporatation deployed an internal blog for its employees shortly after acquiring the blogging service Blogger in early 2003, and since then Google staffers have found many useful and creative ways for the internal blog. Employees keeping track of meeting notes, sharing diagnostics information, sharing snippets of code, as well as more staff uses, like letting co-workers know what they're thinking about and what they're up to.

What are the pros and cons of corporate blogging?
Pros:

• Highly cost effective.
• Be more accessible.
• Ease way of sharing information.
• Reach more employees with a single message.
• Create a searchable archive of thoughts and ideas.
• Save time and indirectly getting large volume of customers.
• Give the writer an opportunity to answer critics in a controlled forum.
• Employees' questions and feedback will be permanently recorded on a blog.
• Organizations can communicate directly with customers, suppliers and investors, as well as employees, helping disseminate and explain strategy.

Cons:

• Loss of productivity.
• Need to master a new style of communicating.
• Too easy for defamation and invasion of privacy.
• Creates an expectation that organization will post regularly.
• Breach information security and loss of company confidentiality.
• Employees with low education level lack of the knowledge with developing technologies.
• Majority of older generation are not comfortable using the internet and related technologies.
• Risk that an ill-judged comment could be seized upon by the media or disgruntled investors.
• Difficult for executives to write freely, particularly at listed companies where they are legally required to publish significant information to all investors at the same time.

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