How a corporate blog can transform your online reputation
Blogging for business
Blogging has become synonymous with online communication in the modern marketing mix, but for many marketing managers, setting up a blog can still seem to be a risky, unprofitable decision. The main reasons to set up and run a corporate blog include:
Become the established authority in your sector: an effective corporate blog can, over time, give a company
market share and set them up as the thought-leader in their industry through the blog posts and direct
Blogging history
Given the scope and power of a well-managed corporate blog within your marketing efforts, it’s worth a potted history of blogging. Context is everything. The rise of blogging merits attention.
Back in early 2000, American corporates such as General Motors and IBM started looking at ways of engaging their customers more directly, and also to utilise a huge online resource in the shape of customer feedback and insight.
Companies such as GM and IBM lead the way, introducing corporate blogs packed with information, one-on-one dialogues with the audience, and increased their online readerships rapidly.
These corporate blogs became significant online presences in their own right, attracting thousands of clicks per week and generating an incredible pull back to the main websites of the blogging parent firms. More importantly, as reputation-builders, blogs were unrivalled.
Different audience, different message?
The movement of corporate blogs from America to Europe (and the UK) has been of the slow and educational variety. It wasn’t until 2005 that British firms got on board the blogosphere and started to experiment with instant, relationship-enhancing blogs. The pick-up of UK corporate remains uneven, largely due to the perception by marketing managers that blogging as a marketing tool requires a huge input of time and effort for very little tangible return. This is not the case.
Measurable, dynamic, powerful
Corporate blogs, like any other web-based marketing medium, are painless to monitor and measure. The main platforms, Blogger and Wordpress, offer analytical tools which provide a huge amount of information to marketers regarding visitor stats, page links, trackbacks and associated detail.
Corporate blogs have taken off since 2008, and the proliferation of company blogs currently in existence is mind-boggling: according to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report:
‘The blogosphere has continued to expand, and we are now beginning to learn more about what powers the blogging community. Though growth has slowed, bloggers are apparently becoming pretty savvy at making money while pursuing their blogging interests.’
In terms of statistics, 133 million blogs have been tracked by Technorati between 2002 and the end of last year. This number is almost double the 72 million tracked as of March 2007, and it appears that the growth of new corporate blogs has slowed alongside the rate of new blog posts on blogs. As is so often the case, audiences are favouring quality not quantity.
Quality not quantity
Quality is always linked to content, and the most popular corporate UK blogs such as Innocent Drinks and Virgin remain focused on providing their readerships with innovative, up-to-date, engaging content – regularly.
The result is that a well-written, engaging, transparent, honest, reader-centric corporate blog is one of the most dynamic and powerful tools available in the online arsenal of communications mediums.
Conclusion
Corporate blogs provide an important element to any online marketing campaign, and due to the nature of their conversational, open, transparent format, many customers find them of significant added value in their perceptions of the parent blogging company. Are you ready to blog?
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