Corporate Blogging: A New Marketing Communication Tool for Companies

Weblogs are frequently modifying web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence. They have emerged as an important new digital medium in the last few years, with internet-based blogs growing exponentially.

A Corporate Weblog is published and used by an organization to reach its organizational goals. The advantage of blogs is that posts and comments are easy to reach and follow due to centralized hosting and generally structured conversation threads.

Although there are many different types of corporate blogs, most can be categorized as either internal or external.

Internal Blogs
It is generally accessed through the corporation's intranet, which are only accessible by people within the firm. It is a weblog that any employee can view. Many blogs are also communal, allowing anyone to post to them. Internal blogs may be used in lieu of meetings and e-mail discussions, and can be especially useful when the people involved are in different locations, or have conflicting schedules. Blogs may also allow individuals who otherwise would not have been aware of or invited to participate in a discussion to contribute their expertise.

The informal nature of blogs may encourage:
· Employee participation
· Free discussion of issues
· Collective intelligence
· Direct communication between various layers of an organization
· A sense of community

External Blogs
It is a publicly available weblog where company employees, teams, or spokespersons share their views, which can be read by people outside the corporation. External blogs is often used to announce new products and services, to explain and clarify policies, or to react on public criticism on certain issues. It also allows a window to the company culture and is often treated more informally than traditional press releases, though a corporate blog often tries to accomplish similar goals as press releases do. In some corporate blogs, all posts go through a review before they are posted. Some corporate blogs allow comments to be made to the posts.

External corporate blogs, by their very nature are biased, though they can also offer a more honest and direct view than traditional communication channels. Nevertheless, they remain as public relations tools. Marketers might expect to have product influencers among the audience of an external blog. Once they find them, they may treat them like VIPs, asking them for feedback on exclusive previews, product testing, marketing plans, or customer services audits.

One of the successful corporate weblog in Malaysia is Exabytes network. Exabytes Network Sdn Bhd is a leading web hosting company based in Malaysia that was founded on the principal of providing the best webhosting solutions to their customers.

Benefits of corporate blogging
The benefit of corporate blogging can be separated to direct benefits and indirect benefits.

Direct benefits of corporate blogging:

1. Increase credibility
   Corporate blogs can provide additional value by adding a level of credibility that is often unobtainable from a standard corporate site. The informality and increased timeliness of information posted to blogs assists with increasing transparency and accessibility in the corporate image. Business blogs can interact with a target market on a more personal level while building link credibility that can ultimately be tied back to the corporate site.
   


2. Build rapport with customers
   Right now, there are more than 100 million blogs worldwide. Publish of a corporate blog is giving customers a channel to interact and get to know the brand and organization in a format that they are familiar and comfortable with. Plus, corporate can earn extra points from them because of speaking their language.
   


3. Free feedback and suggestions from key constituents
   Corporate blogging gives corporate insights to what people are saying about their products, brand, competitors, and marketing. These insights come in the forms of comments on the corporate blog or commentary and discussions that take place on other blogs.
   


4. Increased website traffic from higher search engine rankings
   Because blogs are so easy to publish, corporate can add new content to their blog more frequently. Search engines favor websites with fresh content and ranks the blog higher in search results, which in turn results in a greater number of referrals from search engines to corporate website and blog.
   


5. Position your business as a thought leader
   One of the most effective marketing strategies is “Show, don’t tell”. Corporate can use their blog to take advantage of this strategy by demonstrating expertise and experience in their industry through commentary, guides, and analysis. The quality of corporate blog content reflects the quality of organization.
   


6. Lead generation.
   Having high-quality content on corporate blog goes further to reinforce the value your organization can provide and reduces the need to “hard sell”. Make sure that the contact details are easily accessible and corporate will be getting leads from their blog in no time.

Below are types of reported Indirect benefits from a research on corporate blogging, which can be divided by 3 aspects:

1. Informational aspect:
   Getting and sharing information
   Journaling
   Problem solving
   Getting and giving feedback
   


2. Social aspect:
   Engaging in dialogue
   Building community
   Communicating
   Collaborating
   Gaining perspective
   Gaining company pulse
   Networking
   Developing Reputation
   Building Career
   


3. Other aspect:
   Managing upwards
   Working efficiently
   Self expression
   Replacing technology

In conclusion, the real benefit of corporate blogging may thus be create an informal mechanism that links disparate, less contacted parts of the organization into constructive contact. Blogs appear as an important way for employees to develop their relationships and reputations over time.

By the way, the online community may reinforce the sense of belonging to the organization. It may create community benefits to the organization beyond informational and social benefits they created for individual participants. For large organizations, this could be especially important.
These sense of belonging, may also reinforce the information gathering aspect of blogs. The community and organizational aspects of blogging could similarly enhance knowledge sharing within the organization, not just by creating ties, but enhancing employee’s sense of organizational citizenship.

Besides that, corporate blogging also be found appears to create significant social benefits as well as informational benefits for users of the system. The community benefit and the connections created begin as weak ties with values of perspective and information. Over some time, stronger ties had developed and social benefits are augmented. The persistence of information in blogs provides a valuable tool for members of the organization, including managers and executives to evaluate and learn about employee concerns, emerging issues, and important moving trends in the corporation.

In summary, corporate blogs are a new, powerful marketing communications tool for any organization.