Corporate Blogging: A new marketing communication tool for companies

Nowadays, many corporate and business are using the efficient and effective services which provided by internet to introduce and running their business. One of the most popular tools that the corporate will use is corporate weblog. The purpose of the organization using weblog is mainly to reach their organization al goals. Corporate blogs can separate in two types which is the internet blog and external blog.

Internal blog is the weblog that provide to the employee and workers. Through the internal blog provide by the corporate, it will encourage the employee to participation, free discussion of issues, collective intelligence, direct communication between various layers of an organization and a sense of community.

On the other hands, an external blog is a publicly available weblog where organization employees, spokespersons to share their views or comments. It is often use by the corporate to update or announce new products, services, latest promotion, to explain and clarify policies, or to react on public criticism on certain issues. Through blogging, it will allow a window to the company culture and is often treated more informally than traditional press release. Corporate will try to accomplish similar goals or comment which state in the blog. Corporate blog can collect many valuable information from public or global readers about the feedback on exclusive previews, product testing, marketing plans, customer services, etc. Besides that, corporate can interact with a target market on a personal level while building link credibility that can tied back to the corporate web site.

Advantages of the Corporate Blog :-

1. Ease of publishing – the content of corporate blog and corporate website can be a big different. A blog can allow us to bring information and the latest news of the corpaorate to the public much faster and upadated than traditional website. Public will more interesting to understand and checking the latest information through corporate blog rather than websites.

2. Cost of making and maintaining is lower – To develop a corporate website, it need many graphic designers, usability experts, and it will cost much longer time and high cost. In contrast, blog can structure and restructure the corporate information in many different ways with the lower maintaining cost.

3. Community Building – There are a main different between blog and a “normal” website.Blogs will provide the ability to build a community and to interact with your reader more easily. People can interact with the organization each other through comments and out-of-the-box widgets of the blog.

4. A sense of forgiveness and tolerance – Anything published on a corporate website need to be more careful and must confirm don’t have any error before published it. It is because errors are often taken seriously by those who read. In contrast, as blogs have grown out of the personal sphere, blogs will have more an air of tolerance, of forgiveness.
Disadvantages of the Corporate Blog :-

1. Time consuming activity – Blogging is the time consuming activity, it need to keeping the content fresh and updated. The company need to spend more time to always renew it.

2. Legal and privacy concern – Some of the competitor or some reader who always like to make trouble on other people will purposely leave a bad comment and or bad suggestion on the blog to try to destroy the goodwill of the corporate.


others sources:
http://www.conversationagent.com/2008/02/corporate-blogs.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_blog
http://www.globalprblogweek.com/archives/how_to_launch_a_corp.php
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/columns/article.php/3547411