Corporate Blogging: A new marketing communication tool for campanies

Nowadays, blogs have become a popular communication tools on the Web. The main reason is blog provides a forum for individuals to create their own presentation on the Web to the Web audience. Pyra Labs Blogger stated that "A blog is a web page made up of usually short, frequently updated posts that are arranged chronologically-like what’s new page or a journal."Moreover, blogs have involved in the corporate sector as well which is known as “Corporate Blogging”. A company can use the corporate blogging as a communication tool to accomplish business objective. Corporate blogging can help company to get more comments or opinions of customers in the world. If the corporate blog gains popularity, it means that the company could have thousands of people subscribing to the feeds. Based on a market research, 34% of large companies had established weblogs in the first half of year 2006. Another 35% of the large companies planned to create a blog by the end of year 2006. It shows that the corporate blogging plays a vital role in the company’s business strategy.

A company can gain many benefits through corporate blogging. Firstly, the blog create a new opportunity to communicate with new potential customers. It is because the new potential customers may have a chance to know the company through the corporate blog. Secondly, blog is easy to use and easy to update because many blog software companies provide easy blogging tools to get started such as Blogger.com. Lastly, it can be used as an effective marketing communication tools for the companies. For example, when a company launched a new product, it may publish the information to the corporate blog in order to promote it. The company can have a open dialog with the customers. It also can build a community of people who are interested to the company’s product. According to Steve Rubel, corporate blog can be used as a business strategy for a company.

Although the corporate blogging brings a lot of advantages to the company, there are some significant disadvantages of corporate blogging. There are dozens of cases of workers warned or fired due to the “free speech” they wrote on the companies’ blog. In a survey of Proofpoint, more than 57% of executives among the 332 large companies were treated corporate blog as a source of trouble for their companies. Furthermore, blogs are easy to start but difficult to maintain. It is a time-consuming task for employee to update the blog frequently or write coherently. The blog that is not updated might cause damaging rather than enhancing the reputation of the company.

The example of corporate blog will be given is Gizmodo. It is dedicated to gadgets, gizmos, and cutting-edge consumer electronics. Besides, It is a web magazine which is quickly building a specialized audience in consumer electronics by an advertising business model. In the mid-2004, Gizmodo and Gawker were generated revenue of $6,000 per month through the corporate blog.


Related links:
http://www.blogtips.org/does-your-non-profit-organisation-need-a-blog/
http://sbinformation.about.com/cs/ecommerce/a/bblogs.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_blog
http://www.businessknowhow.com/internet/corporate-blog.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Rubel
http://www.enterpriseblogs.info/corporate-blogging/disadvantages
http://apins.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/advertising-marketing-and-blogging/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gizmodo
http://gizmodo.com/