Corporate Blogging: A New Marketing Communication Tools for Companies

With the recent global financil crisis breaking up worlds economy, many organization are finding ways or even new approaches to gain customers trust by positioning strong product or service brands into customer's mindset. Apart from the conventional way of attracting customer through million dollars of marketing and advertising either by tv advertisement or newspaper. Organization has moved upstream with the trend of "blogging", it used to be a tools for a person to express personal thoughts but now organizations too have take alternatives in distinguishing itself from other competitor by "corporate blogging".

Blogs is known as entries contribution of an author which posted on a regular basis, these author are commonly known as bloggers. Corporate higher management such as directors, managers seem to own a blogs nowadays, but their focus derive around corporates issue. These corporate blogs are contributed by a few author or maybe more.

Content in the blogs are usually promoting or discuss a new products and services, which encourage viewer to be able to give comment, besides, employees may too be able to provide detail information of a particular product or service being introduced. Some may argue corporate blogs may be biased in distributing the right information but nevertheless it has been a very popular tools in communicating directly with customer.

On the contrary, organization which owns a blog are able to reached out to a broader market compared to other forms of marketing, apart from trying to sell anything an organization also seem more "humane" or friendlier to approach by customer or viewer.

But after all the above statement, is corporate blogging is really that useful or beneficial towards an organization??

Adressing the issue above, benefits of corporate blogging can be identify is the following:-

• Create Transparency

Corporate blogging enable organization to communication with customer by providing comment space for feedback. It creates transparency as to which the form of communication are being delivered in a more casual way rather than a sale person trying to push a products or services. It allows transparency in a certain extend.

• Instant Feedback & Communication

Communication has made easy through chatbox and leaving down comments after each post. Blogger can response to any comment instantly besides, it is the best of handling any complaints or critism as prompt action can be taken to minimise customers dissatisfaction.

• Linkage to other Blogs

As corporate wants to stay at customer top priority list of blogs more visited, frequent post entries ensures corporate blogs are maintained in the top search engines when a person search anything related to the organization or issue addressed by it. Moreover, other blogger will linked corporate blogs in their own blogs expanding wide coverage of customer which might be difficult for organization to do so in advertising alone.

• Less Costly

Corporate blogs are known to save cost as it do not need much resources only active author to post up entries and computers. Organization which has effectively carried out this form of communication tools has realised the potential of utilising it. Besides, its proved to be less costly by maining only one blogs which able to reach wide coverage of target market.

15 Most Popular Corporate Blogs (Technorati ranked) – May 2008
#15. Boeing – Authority: 67
#14. Monster – Authority: 73
#13. Kodak – Authority: 105
#12. Delta – Authority: 252
#11. Yahoo! – Authority: 297
#10. General Motors – Authority: 364
#9. Ask – Authority: 364
#8. LinkedIn – Authority: 591
#7. Digg – Authority: 641
#6. Dell – Authority: 799
#5. Yahoo! Search – Authority: 1130
#4. Facebook – Authority: 1478
#3. Flickr – Authority: 1744
#2. Adobe – Authority: 1797
#1. Google – Authority: 8492

Source: New PR Wiki, http://mariosundar.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/top-15-corporate-blogs-ranked-may-2008/