Corporate blog

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A corporate blog is a weblog published and used by the organization to reach its organizational goals. Although there are many different types of corporate blogs, most can be categorized as either external or internal.

Types of corporate blogs

Internal blogs

Corporate blogs can be very strong communication tools within or on behalf of a corporate community. Free from many of the constraints of traditional corporate communications, they can explore original issues and provoke thought among an audience that may tune out from other messages.

Generally, anyone can write comments to any post in corporate blogs. Anyone can write a comment to any comment or simply anyone can write a new post, in internal blogs. Internal blogs are in many cases good alternatives to meetings. People may not have frequent meetings, about many important matters, for two reasons:

• distance of the meeting location and
• availability of all the people at the proposed meeting time.

However the way community members communicate and share information in a blog environment creates practically any number of small or large virtual meetings that community members can participate at any time of the day (or night).

Since blogs are open to the community, the hurdle and hesitation of sending invitations to the exact/correct number of related people is removed. Consequently fewer people will feel that they are kept away from the decision making process. Since every post is open to the community, anyone can take part in the decision making process, simply by adding his/her comments.

A talking community creates the healthiest environment in the decision making process with collective intelligence of the elite crowd.

Blogs, in many cases, are more practical in use than emails.

Emails are not the best corporate communication and information sharing tools, since

• people receive too many of them and
• people are not always good enough in archiving their emails, therefore they may not find some of them, later when they need them again.

In many big organizations there are at least a few but mostly many internal blogs on their intranet, according to the aim or target of the blog.

Blogs are used at every level of the organization. A good example may be the participation of the production workers with the improvement proposals, using the network connected kiosk around the production area, in some organizations. In such organizations, any other people can make a comment on the proposal and the improvement action is triggered automatically without the hierarchical vertical confirmation process.

Even if the made proposal is not applicable for some reasons, it may still inspire some other members in the crowd for more practical solutions.

Posts and comments are very easy to reach and follow. All the new browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari and IE7 support the technology called RSS. RSS technology, with just one click, helps the readers to create a button which enable them to see some number of last posts in a small window, without the need to visit the URL of the blog. RSS is very useful especially when the posts are sent less frequently than visits readers can make. Then the readers are simply informed if there are new posts, or not, without visiting the blog^[1].

Automatic archiving and recalling of the past posts may be much faster than past emails. Emails are kept in the tree of directories. If an email is archived in a low level directory and if the directory is named differently from the sender's or receiver's name, it may require making a special search to find it. However blogs use tags instead of directories. It is recommended to attach more than one tag to each post for the future ease of finding.

For example, there can be a post about innovative marketing approach to increase the truck sales in Turkey.

If such a post is tagged with the words innovation, marketing, truck and Turkey, then it can easily be found anytime in the future under the posts listed with any of these tags or may be much faster if the posts with the tag combinations like innovation-marketing or truck-Turkey are listed.

Some companies create their own internal taxonomy but this may not be even necessary since each new tag is automatically put into the tag cloud and members generally prefer to use the pre-created tags, rather than creating a similar new tag.

Some benefits of internal blogs can be listed as^[2]:

• It improves participation spirit, collaboration, and the capabilities of team learning. It is ideal to run projects and to work with heterogeneous teams. It is also useful to promote dialogue and find lateral ideas outside the team.
• It allows integrating conversations with a shared vision. It is an excellent means for the leaders to communicate.
• It is the space where interpretations and different points of view come up so that the any member of the organization can discuss and debate them.
• It is an excellent means for the employees to achieve an integrated vision of the company by joining in conversations.
• It implies an open communication platform that allows new ways relating and coordinating actions among the organizational members and between the latter and the network of external relationships.
• It becomes the written memory of the organization. Furthermore, writing conveys emotional stability which eventually promotes the process of organizational development.
• They speed up the transference and transformation of knowledge to make ideas flow easily and take learning into action.

External blogs

Primary function of corporate communications/public relations today is network building. External blogs are participatory communications tools that can build complex and effective discussions. Blogs build connections and links between and among your key audiences, which help the corporations to use these networks over time to persuade people to action, to respond to a crisis, to leverage market conversations and to improve the business overall.

Effectiveness of a network depends on

1. number of users
2. connection between the nodes

and blogs are particularly well designed to help a corporation to do the both parameters, since blogs are link-heavy, and the link is the core technology for making networks visible.

There are a variety of sites in which a graphical representation of the links (e.g., Opte Project, MyDensity.com) or track online conversations (Blogpulse, Technorati, PubSub) are received, typing in a url^[3]

The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. This new balance of power, where consumers own marketing is aptly named "Consumer generated marketing". Blogs are not only the corporate tools but also consumer tools that promote companies who fulfil their promises, and to destroy those who break them.

Marketers expect to have product evangelists or influencers among the audiences. Once they find them they treat them like VIPs, asking them exclusive previews, product testing, consultation on marketing plan, customer services audit, etc. ^[4]

The business blog can have the additional value by adding a level of credibility that is often unobtainable from a standard corporate site. It gives businesses an opportunity to show a different side that doesn't have to be all suits and ties. Business blogs can interact with a target market on a more personal level while all at the same time building link credibility that can ultimately be tied back to the corporate site.

A list of externally available corporate blogs is available at The NewPR/Wiki.

Product blogs

Air France Mexico

• Air France Mexico Written by Air France employees

CISCO

• Blogs@Cisco Opinions and insights from Cisco leaders

Dell

• Direct2Dell

HP

• HP Blogs

Microsoft

• MSDN Blogs Blogs from Microsoft Developer Network developers

Mercadona

• Mercadona.info Corporate blog from Mercadona, biggest Spanish supermarket chain.

• Mercadona-online Corporate blog from Mercadona, offering informatino on online shopping, ecommerce and security.

Midwest Airlines

• Midwest Airlines Travels with Tish -- Girlfriends' Getaway Guide Promotes travel to cities served by Midwest Airlines. Written by a Midwest employee, the blog provides unbiased travel tips and tourist information based on the personal travel experiences of the blog's author.

Nokia

• S60 Blogs Several blogs on multimedia, applications, user experience, etc.
• Forum Nokia Blogs Blogs by developers on Nokia platforms

Quicken Loans

• Quicken Loans Blog Written by Quicken Loans employees highlighting the company's culture and things they find important.

Quixtar

• Real Quixtar Blog Robin Luymes, Manager- PR & Editorial at Quixtar
• Inside Quixtar Beth Dornan, Director of Communications for Quixtar

CEO blogs

Although there are different debates whether CEOs should blog^[5] or whether they should not^[6], blogging among the CEOs is becoming widely popular. Here are some CEO or Senior Executive Blogs:

• Robert Davies - International Business Leaders Forum
• Andy Mulholland, Ron Tolido - Capgemini
• Alan Meckler - Jupiter Media
• Manoj Sharma - DifferWorld
• Bill Brown - Cedarville University
• Corey Donovan - Vibrant Technologies
• Bob Langert - McDonald's
• Bob Lutz - GM
• Jacques Kemp - ING Group Asia Pacific
• Bob Sutor - IBM
• Federico Minoli - Ducati
• Hu Yoshida - Hitachi Data Systems
• Irving Wladawsky-Berger - IBM
• {http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/blogs/jm/ John Mackey - Whole Foods Market]
• Jonathan Schwartz - Sun Microsystems
• Michel Edouard Leclerc - E. Leclerc (in French)
• Randy Baseler - Boeing
• Rich Marcello - HP
• Joel Warady - JWG
• Stephen Turcotte - Backbone Media, Inc.
• Bill Marriott - Marriott International

Popularity

Either external or internal, blogs are not new to the corporate world. More than 5% of the Fortune 500 companies blog^[7] externally.

A market research^[8] shows that 35 percent of large companies plan to institute corporate Weblogs in 2006. According to the research, combined with the existing deployed base of 34 percent, nearly 70 percent of all corporate website operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006.

Language of the blogs

Blogs have their own discipline of preparation the information. Generally information is never posted in a way that would mean “because I say so.” In a blog post, as many pieces of information as possible are linked to other sources as a proof of how reliable the information source is and also to help the readers to see better view of the whole picture.

Blog monitoring

• CyberAlert
• Cymfony
• Factiva
• MediaQuotient Hass MS&L
• Nielsen Buzzmetrics
• Scout Blogging
• Umbria
• CEO Blog Watch

References

1. ^ Bradbury, D. (April 11 2006), FT, Might RSS help to solve your web mess?
2. ^ Fernández Dutto, C. (September 19th, 2005)Internal blogs: How to design powerful conversations that open possibilities for action and collaboration within blogs
3. ^ Albrycht, E. (September 19th, 2005) Blogs: Foundational Tools for Network Building.
4. ^ Céré, J. (September 21st, 2005) Consumer Generated: from Mayhem to Marketing.
5. ^ Sessum, J. (September 19th, 2005) "Why CEOs should blog"
6. ^ Taylor, D. (September 19th, 2005) "Why CEOs Shouldn’t Blog"
7. ^ Anderson C. and Mayfield R. Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki
8. ^ Tekrati, (June 26, 2006) Deployment of Corporate Weblogs Will Double in 2006, Says JupiterResearch

External Links

• A weekly roundup of what's happening in the business blog world, along with links to relevant, updated business blogs
• NewsCloud's Guide for Bloggers
• Blog designed to help bloggers new and old optimize their blog
• BlogWrite for CEOs
• The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil (Penguin Portfolio 2006)
• Brad Henry SEO Business Blog, Sep 11, 2006
• Corporate Blogging:Is it worth the hype?, Backbonemedia 2005
• Corporate Blogging Blog
• Global PR Blog Week 2.0, Sep 19, 2005
• iUpload
• Dosh Dosh - Online Business and Marketing Blog
• Blogtrepreneur - Business Blog
• Social networking becomes work, FT, By Geoff Nairn, April 11 2006
• The Inside Story on Company Blogs, BusinessWeek, Feb 14, 2006
• Biz Blog Review,Corporate Blog Evaluation Strategy, USC Independent Study on Corporate Blogs By Fiona Torrance, January 2006
• This Month In Optimize: Nothing To Fear From Executive Blogging, InformationWeek, July 11, 2005
• "Should companies integrate corporate blogs into their communication strategies?"
• Master Thesis about Blog Marketing, Corporate Blogs and more
• 9 Reasons Why Businesses Should Embrace Blogging, WordpressTutorials.com
• Guide to Small Business Blogs
• Northeastern University and Backbone Media Blogging Success Study, BackboneMedia 2006