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Hi, welcome to our blog site, E-Commerce-Sorority12. We are students from bachelor of commerce (hons) accounting and would like to give you a brief introduction on this blog. This blog is specially made to touch on the subject E-Commerce whereby we will be posting some interesting articles regarding this subject. Feel free to visit our blog site and you are most welcome to leave a comment. Thank you!

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Corporate Blogging: A New Marketing Communication Tool for Companies

Nowadays, there are many corporations started to create a blog site with the purpose to maintain a competitive edge. The corporation blogging is a new marketing communication tools for all companies and users create their blogs through internal, external and CEO Blogs, and the users may use web browsers likes Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer 7 which support RSS technology. Basically, RSS technology provides more convenient way for readers to read recent posts without actually visiting the blog.

Corporate Blogging has been labeled into 3 types:
Internal Blog, External Blog and CEO Blog. Internal blog only can be accessed through the corporation’s internet and it allows employee for view only. Typically, internet blogs has been replacing company meetings and e-mail discussions, it is useful for employees who stay in different locations, or maybe they have conflicting schedules. In addition, blogs encourage employees to participate in a discussion to contribute their expertise.

An external blog is defined as a publicly available web log. It allows company employees, teams, or spokespersons to share their opinion. It is also a place where the company is using it to announce new products and services or may be to declare the end of old products. Moreover, external blogs able to explain the company policies and act as a medium that allows a window to the company culture. By creating external corporate blog, it provides additional value by adding a level of credibility that is often unobtainable from a standard corporate site. As time passed by, CEO Blogs becoming popular and there are still debates on whether CEO s should blog or not.

A corporate blog is important because it allows current and potential customers to associate the brand with a face and a personality. It tries to reduce gap that already existed between the “inaccessible” company and the “average” consumer. According to Brito, he said that “It is a way for us to appear less corporate and put a human face when we interact online. They believe people will be more friendly and confident to buy products from you this way rather than just displaying a logo or corporate brand.”

Furthermore, a corporate blog can be a representation of the company’s values, beliefs, philosophy and direction. It acts as a medium that encourages a two-way conversation where customers are able to interact and provide valuable feedbacks to the company in direct way. Other than that, corporate blogging has given the authority or power towards employee position as though-leaders in their industry, where the employees are responsible in reputation management during crisis, building brand awareness and loyalty for the company together with increasing brand visibility, traffic and links.

Dell is an example of corporate blog, the company posts with a great conversational voice, often breaks news on their blog (which keep people coming back), and listens the responds from customers. Besides that, Dell has frequently upgraded their company news and encourages repeated visits. Second example is Adobe, it offers their employee to write blog at the same time assisting their company to promote company’s product for example posting tutorials, advice and reviews

However, there is an existing risk when creating a corporate blogs and the likelihood to be occurred such as negative comments from customers, failed to control over the message and hard to measure success. As we know that, corporate blogs allow bloggers to comment freely on the company and most of the time, companies are very sensitive to criticisms especially those criticisms that will influence the company’s image. So, the company may set a moderation policy and clear comment which can be offset negative comment. And then, the corporate blog failed to control over the message as the blog is a bit of maverick and mangers treat this as a risk. Of course, people may talking out there in the either and some companies would gain advantage from the story.

In terms of measurement of performance of corporate blog, it is rather difficult to measure its success because marketers measure campaign success by drops at the end of the funnel through visits and registrations. The problem with blog is that social software success could take the form of comments, track backs and qualitative intangibles, but all this result could not represent whether the corporate blog is success or not.

Before the blog come to the end, we would like to provide you some tips on creating an effective corporate blog. When creating a corporate blog, the user must be aware that your blog is all about representing your brand and let readers know our company well. Then, keep each of your blogs focused to a single topic to ensure the readers get a clear message on your blog. Lastly, the blogger should focus on serving your readers more readily than pleasing your employee because customer satisfaction has more influential impact on our business.

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