Mon 26 Jun 2006
Got Blog? Corporate Blogs on the Rise (Still)
Posted by David under Cambridge , Research , Start-Up , Tech , Web , Web 2.0Jupiter research has announced a study that corporate blogs 35 percent of large companies plan to institute corporate Weblogs this year. Combined with the existing deployed base of 34 percent, nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006.
What does this mean? We’ll C-Level executives have probably heard in a cocktail party or from the latest “marketing how-to” book that blogs are the way to go! Actually, my sarcastic tone aside, a blog is an excellent way to communicate with customers and even your internally audiences.
I’ve instated corporate blogs to help with search marketing results (works great) but I also stumbled upon how great they are as a way to communicate internally. I spend a lot of time keeping up on industry trends that I usually email around to the C-Level, Sales and Product teams. It’s a much easier task just to create an internal blog that your staff can subscribe to and search when they need it.
The big question with the spread of so many corporate blogs now is what they hell are you going to write about? We all know the concept of a corporate blog sounds great at the previously mentioned cocktail party but it’s a real commitment. Plus you have to set real guidelines for what you are going to cover - especially with the NDA crazy tech firms.
When setting up a coporate blog it’s important to set out the correct strategy and make sure everyone at the top is bought-in. You also need to set real content guidelines that fit with your overall communication strategy. There are agencies and technology companies looking to fill this need and help companies tackle this issue.
I was reading a decent blog on this subject by Cambridge based Hubspot (just announced seed funding). I can also forward you to other companies, post a comment and I will email you back.
June 26th, 2006 at 11:56 am
Any other companies that you can recommend to assist and provide guidelines for setting up our corporate blog would be great. It’s definitely something that has been creeping up the priority list but I don’t think everyone is in tune to what exactly is involved. Thanks!
June 26th, 2006 at 1:21 pm
Thanks - I’ll shoot you an email.
June 29th, 2006 at 11:08 pm
Blogging content strategy depends a lot upon your audience, your interests you’re your products. Your blog focuses on technology products. I think it’s important to make the point, that many technology blogs are successful when a technology company provides a complex product.
Microsoft, SUN, HP, Macromedia/adobe are all great examples of companies with complex products that blog successfully. These early blogging pioneers all started up blogs to provide information quickly to their customers. Their blogs gave their product managers a way to answer questions and get feedback from customers.
I think another example of a great blog, are Intuit’s blogs. Intuit provides accounting software, and the software has a lot of features and customers take time to learn how to use the accounting systems. Blogs really help customers to ask questions and receive information quickly.
If you have a simple product however, there’s not much to chat about on a blog. Maybe industry trends, but I think it takes another approach to develop a successful blog for a simple product. Stonyfield Farms is a great example of a company that has a simple product. Yogurt is as about as simple a product you can find. Customers don’t have much to choose from except flavor. Stonyfield has two blogs, one focused on healthy kids and the other on organic farming. Both blogs cover topics that are more related to customer psychographics than the product. When people read articles about babies or organic farming, they associate Stonyfield with organic products that help to build healthy kids. And that’s not a bad thing for a yogurt company to be associated with.
I think building a content strategy can be difficult, especially if you don’t have a lot of time. Effective blogging is more about building relationships with other bloggers. I was wondering what you thought about that idea, and if you have built relationships with bloggers through your blogging efforts on this blog?
September 7th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
it would be better with other languages support, but thanks..