Corporate Blog: Worth the Commitment?

Why you should have a corporate blog:

You can align yourself with your customer's values. A corporate blog lets you establish a dialogue with the people who use your products and services most often. It can even lead to the organic creation of brand devotion blogs.

You can change ingrained perceptions. Beginning in 2000, Microsoft launched a series of employee blogs that showed a human side to the monolithic corporation. Microsoft employee Robert Scoble has an estimated 3.5 million readers. 

Mainstream media journalists read blogs. The Wall Street Journal recently quoted Google's corporate blog and a new study suggests that 75 % of journalists get story ideas from blogs.

Proper blogging helps improve your search engine rankings. Corporate blogs drive traffic to your company's main website by allowing you to continually upload new content that is rich in keywords for search engines.

It's a trend that is not going away. 10 % of Fortune 500 companies currently operate corporate blogs. Whether the business is General Electric or Amazon, corporations are finding ways to connect with their customers.

An effective corporate blog can be a sales and marketing blockbuster. Or it can be a public relations disaster careening down the Internet superhighway challenging your carefully crafted brand message. And, if not built and managed properly your blog can remain unsearched or blacklisted by the big bad Google. So, it is important to acknowledge that a blog takes a seemingly disproportionate amount of commitment. The process of creating new content for a blog can become a task that even a company with the most enthusiastic prospects begins to dread.

You can combat that by identifying the stakeholders in your organization- those responsible for the design and generation of content, monitoring responses, and improving your search rankings. Work with them in the launch phase to establish your expectations and make sure the blog is a responsible extension of your brand. After that, give them the resources and time that they need to succeed. Once out of the launch phase, there are a few more difficulties you may encounter.

A blog requires transparency. The blogosphere (collection of bloggers and readers) demands an honest view, one that acknowledges criticism and mistakes, for you to establish credibility.

The blogosphere thrives on conflict. Perceived slights or corporate indifference fuels Internet watchdog groups like the Consumerist. If your response isn't appropriate, the resulting public relations fallout can be bigger than the initial issue.

Your ROI is undefined. It may be difficult for you to determine your return on investment. If you can't develop metrics to measure how the blog integrates with your marketing and sales strategy, you can't assess the value of your assessment.

With imperfect metrics, it's ultimately up to you to decide what you need from your corporate blog and establish an acceptable rate of return. Whether that comes in the form of sales leads or mainstream media coverage, you can begin to measure the efficacy of your blogging after the first six months of being online. If you don't have six months to wait for results, then don't launch a blog.

You don't need a corporate blog; but a well-managed, tightly focused effort could improve the public relations and sales initiatives of your organization. As you work to increase the transparency of your organization and develop values that align with your customer base, you can develop a comprehensive marketing strategy that synchronizes traditional and new media components.