The blog has become one of the most cost-effective Internet marketing tools, due to companies’ growing need to interact with potential and existing customers.
Until a few years ago, having a home page was everything in Internet marketing, to deliver a company’s message to consumers and give them a nice company image. The growth of Internet has been encouraging consumers to be actively involved in companies’ marketing and production activities. They are not just sitting and waiting for the products and services anymore, but also they try to give their opinions on productions and companies’ activities directly.
These active customers, also called pro-sumers, demand high level of access and interaction in the company’s decision-making process, and blog was the best place for them to communicate directly to companies. This new trend on web is called ‘BR (Brand Relations)’ that covers the area that Public Relations could not reach-approaching each customer’s mind directly. According to this trend, a blog is one of the quickest, easiest, and most cost-effective ways to listen directly what customers want.
However, is it really useful? Should every company start a blog?
A blog is a completely open space, so if someone starts to talk about a specific topic, others can freely react with their comments. It is a place that totally relying on public opinion, so it is hard to predict what kind of reactions that public will make on a post. This means, sometimes it is much more difficult to manage a blog than a website’s contents management. Debates are often happened on company blogs between consumers, but also between a company and consumers, and how the company reacts can contribute or damage its brand image, because even though a blog is just a blog, people who write comments and join debates can be serious and they have a power to spread the story and comments.
Therefore a blog should be considered as a seed of conversation that can create either positive or negative buzz and it is treated as a part of Marketing and Branding tool. Then these points might need to be discussed fundamentally before launching a blog:
Who is going to visit the blog? And who should be the writer of the company blog?
How they should react when there is a negative comment?
How a company should reflect and monitor people’s raw opinions on their strategies?
What kind of topics need to be selected and discussed?
Yes, it may be just a blog that anyone write anything, but depending on how to manage it properly, it can be a key tool of integrated marketing communication, a really effective new media tool that helps developing communication plan in traditional media channels, or a good contribution in developing brand equity by focusing on consumer involvement and preference enhancement.
If a company decides to start corporate blogging, there are five types of corporate blogs (with examples) that it could choose.
1. Company Blog
This is the most common form of the corporate blog. In our opinion, the corporate blog is definitely the next stage in the evolution of the corporate website.
Examples: Top 5 include: Google, Adobe, Flickr, Facebook, and Yahoo! Search.
2. CEO Blog
Examples:Sun CEO - Jonathan Schwartz’s blog, Boeing VP of Marketing - Randy Tinseth’s blog
3. Industry Blog
This is an interesting type of corporate blog one that we should beware of, because it places some difficult ethical choices for the company at hand. Miller Brewing’s pseudo industry blog - Brew blog purports to be an insider blog, while taking potshots at arch competitor - Anheuser Busch.
This is definitely not an advisable strategy for every company but should be considered an option if you consider yourself or employees in your organization as thought leaders in your respective field/technology and choose to establish a blog to discuss best practices.
Example:Miller Brewing’s Brew Blog
4. Department or Product Blog
Again, department blog is another common style or kind of blogging, which is very popular and ultimately essential for large organizations (particularly Fortune 500). Cases in point are Microsoft, Sun, or SAP’s developer blogs in any particular space. Google’s extensive array of product blogs across their different product offerings (close to 90 in number) probably is another great example.
Examples:1. SAP IT Blogs 2. Sun Blogs3. Google - Product Blogs
5. Customer Service Blog
And, finally, the customer service blog or community blog. Given the preponderance of community forums and discussion groups as the new kind of communication media that companies chose to use as conversation methods with their users, we can see the evolution of this kind of a blog, yet.
Example: Microsoft Community Blogs
Related links:
http://blog.precedent.co.uk/unprecedented/2008/06/16/br-blog-relation-a-new-way-of-marketing-communication/
http://mariosundar.wordpress.com/2008/05/19/the-5-types-of-corporate-blogs-with-examples/
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