Corporate Blogging: A new marketing communication tool for companies

Nowadays, Corporate Blogging is widely used and published by an organization to achieve the organizational goals through internal, external and CEO Blogs. Every day, 70,000 new blogs are appeared on the Internet. Corporate blogging provides a clear mind map or guidelines of overall marketing or communication strategy to its employees and third parties with organization communication plan and media mix.

Besides that, corporate blogging encourages employee participation in contribution of expertise, free discussion of issues or topics and deal with it, collective intelligence, be a direct communication between various layers of an organization and shares with others employees, teams or spokespersons publicly. Furthermore, it can be used to announce new products and services, explain and clarify policies of the company and to react on public criticism on certain issues.

Blog for business are no differences from the channels such as video, audio, presentations and so on. The kind you can expect from blogs is mainly about stronger relations with important target groups.

From a business perspective there are several potential reasons to lead the corporate has a blog. The reasons are as below:

1. The Conversations

Author is not alone out there. There's always other bloggers sharing their interests. Author must become a part of the conversation by linking to those blogs from posts of their own, stating his or her opinions, publishing related information or thoughts. If the author does it well and they link to the author and a kind of conversation between blogs have started. It's of course not necessary to actively try to converse, but most bloggers would argue that this is an important part of blogging.

2. Customer RelationshipsIn a forum where author’s main objective is not to sell, but expected to have a more personal relationship between them and their customers. Blogs are a fast way to join the customers' discussions, provide tips and insights or receive feedback.

3. Internal CollaborationUse blogs as a workspace where project members keep each other updated without wasting time to write reports or search the Outlook inbox. At the same time, also can increase the employees’ motivation in their jobs.

4. Test ideas or productsA blog is informal. It's part of a conversation where people can comment, and the blog can provide the corporate with a measure of value. Publish an idea and see if it generates interest.

5. Knowledge ManagementBlogs works in two ways. First of all, there are an easy way for the readers to find information and resources that they want or need. That's obvious could be used internally in many organizations. Secondly, blogs are a kind of "university light" for the bloggers. Blogging is on-the-job learning.
Finally, a blog is a tool, not a panacea to solve your company problems when you face it. Therefore, don't expect it to turn your company around.

For further information, please refer to these links:
1. http://www.corporateblogging.info/basics/why/
2. http://www.corporateblogging.info/basics/what/
3.http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/28/news/companies/pluggedin_fortune/index.htm 4.http://mariosundar.wordpress.com/2008/05/19/the-5-types-of-corporate-blogs-with-examples/