Corporate Blogging: A TRUTH

In last article we have seen what is corporate blogging & how its spreading among companies.

According to Technorati report, in one year corporate blogging increased by 330% which itself shows a huge upthrust is there in it. Today, in every company almost 20% of its marketing budget spend on new ways of promotion like blogs etc. With the increasing demand of blogs as Public Relation, there are number of ways adopted by companies to promote its unique image, products, queries & suggestions etc.

According to Marketing Profs analyst David Felfoldi, six types of blogs prevails in corporate blogging, each one has its own importance.

1. Corporate Newsroom

2. Product blog

3. Developer/channel partner Blog

4. Event/promotional blog

5. CEO/ thought- leader blog (Jason Calacanis of Sequoia Capital)

6. Company evangelist (Matt Cutts, a well-known blogger who works at Google)

7. Internal blogs

Answer of last post are:

Code of conduct: actually its not well defined some of blog experts said that it should be formal but what I thought that if you are initiating something for PR & sifting traffic from your web portal to your blog then code of conduct should be informal and interactive because if the users who posted comments will not be satisfied, they will not come back & share anything with you.

Handling of blogs: as above mentioned there are six major type of corporate blogs and each blog is handle by one senior manager of the deptt. i.e.

· product blog- it will be handled by product development deptt.

· Company evangelist: these blogs are handled by senior level mangers who have lot of experience in particular field because the visitors on this blogs are also well known experts in particular field, so expect quality answer of their queries.

· CEO blog: these blogs are directly taken care by CEOs himself.There is a list of few international & national CEOs

International CEOs

Indian CEOs

Rajesh Jain, CEO of Netcore

Dr. Vivekanand P Kochikar Associate Vice President and Principal Consultant - KM, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

George Eby Mathew Principal & Head of IT management Research, at Infosys

Dina Mehta, Explore Research & Consultancy

Most amazing fact I have seen was government departments of various countries also have their blogs.

Indonesia: Juwono Sudarsono, Minister of Defense

Iran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President

United Kingdom: David Miliband, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

Andrew Wadge, Chief Scientist, Food Standards Agency

United States: Department of Defense

Few days back, I was shocked by seeing India blog& india blogs which contains the database of best Indian blogs with various categories i.e. CEO’s blog, marketing blogs, personal blogs etc. It has database of few thousand of Indian blogs which shows that there is huge growth in Indian blogging sector too.But on the other side if we see Indian comscore report which shows that Internet penetration in India is meagre 3% , around 2.2 crore people out of 1,129,866,154 population (till july 2007).

Benefits of corporate blogging:

1. quickly giving consumers company updates,

2. allowing for open feedback with consumers, and

3. inclusion in search engine indexes, and thus possible increased traffic.

4. Online newsletter with community feedback i.e. ICFAI stockyard (it has no blog but have its forum), google press centre.

5. Information sharing

Have you ever think about the negatives of blogging?

Thanks for visiting..........

PASSIONATE MANAGER

Corporate Blogging: New PR tool?

Today personal writing become professional, initially when this blogging introduced it was for passionate writers but now this blogging takes new turn and become Public Relation (PR) tool.

According to Susane M healthfield (HR expert@ about.com): “What sets blogs apart from other online writing … is their dynamic nature (as opposed to static Web pages) and their voice (style).” The voice of the writer (or writers) of the blog, in a successful blog, is unique to that blog.

In her article, she mentioned seven reasons for starting corporate blogs in detaled manners. Today companies are so much customer centric they are trying to involve lot of customer intraction in product development to meet customer demands. So, companies conduct no. of pilot tests, focus groups, brain storming session etc to know about customers demand, perception, requirements etc… Now blogging help companies in similar & in more refined way. When any new product launch or customer faced any problem retaled to company product he/she can directly communicate to the company professional through the corporate blogs & another most important feature of corporate blogging is company time to time updates about its usage, features & new changes in varity of products.

There are no. of companies in European union which are using “ corporate blogging” as PR tools because it’s a informal communication between customers & companies just like communities & forums. There is partial of companies which are using corporate blogging as PR tool in EU.

According to wiki corporate blog research only 8% (40) of the fortune 500 companies were blogging till (may/2006). In one year, corporate blogs increased to 132 (till june/2007).

Check out the list:

In india when pulsar was launched there was dedicated community of “BAJAJ PULSAR” owners and there in the community they discuss about the features, market response, individuals’ reaction for new pulsar. The interesting thing in that community was that it was started by company employee itself to know about the views & reaction of “BAJAJ PULSAR” owners. Same experiment is done by HONDA motors when it launched “ UNICORN” in India, in the initial phase of launch Indian customers were worrying about the mono-suspension in the bike, so company used community as PR tool to promote its utility & benefits from UNICORN users(innovators).

In India, there are some companies which are using blog as PR tool for its PR & promotions: Some of them are given below:

Tata Interactive Systems

ebay India

Tekriti Software

Score India

Now in india majority of population thought that it’s a boring, non effective & cumbersome medium to promote yourself(company).But Sun microsystem promoting blogging among all its employee than any other company in the world, according to the company 3000/32000 emplyees have their own blog and company CEO have corporate blog there are no. of vistors, third party developers visit company blog.

ISSUES:

Code of conduct , what should be the mode of communication (formal or informal)?

Who will look after these corporate blog i.e. entry level managers, middle level managers or Senior mangers?

THANK YOU

PASSIONATE MANAGER