According Wikipedia, there have three types of corporate blogs that is external blog, internal blog and CEO Blog. Internal blog is a weblog that any employee can view, it encourage employee participation, free discussion of issues, direct communication between various layers of organization and is a sense of community.
| Examples of Internal Blog Applications | ||
| Purpose | Blogger | Tone |
| Corporate level communication | CEO, CIO, CFO, President | Formal |
| Project or contract level communication | Group/project leaders, department heads | Formal |
| Industry news and discussion | Individual employees | Formal or casual |
| Water cooler content | Individual employees | Informal and casual |
External blogs is a publicly available weblog where company employees, teams, or spokesperson share their view, and it often used to announce new products or new services, to explain and clarify policies, or to react on public criticism on certain issue. It is very useful in company marketing communication, the marketer can asking the user for feedback, doing product testing or shows marketing plans to the customer through the blog.
The goals of an organization to start corporate blog are following:
· Driving Sales - directly promoting products and services - for example announcing new products.
· Public Relations - management of crisis situations, promoting company vision and developments etc
· Customer Relations - fostering customer loyalty, building relationships with clients and customers etc
· Research and Development - garnering feedback and suggestions from clients
· Information and Education - giving customers information on how to use products
· Internal Communications - password protected blogs for staff - for training, communications, work-shopping ideas etc
· Community Development - developing client community around a product.
That is the reason of why we say corporate blog is a new marketing communication tool for companies. A successful corporate blog is allow companies to present accurate information without the filter of the media or advertising, provide some marketing information to the customer such as direction of how to use the product or what is the latest product of the company.
Marketing Nirvana has ranked the top 15 corporate blogs. Besides that, Debbieweil also summary the 8 tips for corporate blog in 2008:
1. Use humor
2. Write short. Less is more
3. Post at least once a week
4. Link to naysayers and competitors
5. Appoint a blog editor
6. Build redundancy into your approval process
7. Consider joining the newly-formed blog council
8. Just do it
But the blogger also need to careful to maintain their corporate blog. The blog will face failure if the executive who is responsible to write the blog isn’t fully committed and passionate. Seomoz.org has summarized the reason why corporate blogging fails:
√ Blogs vs. Corporate culture
√ Editorial Control Issues
√ Unfamiliarity with a Blog’s Structure
√ Misunderstanding Your Audience
√ Crafting a Corporate Voice, Rather than a Personal One
√ Attempting to “Sell” or “Market”
√ Domain & URL Issues
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