Now let us begin our journey into corporate media with Corporate Blogging. Blogs are not just useful tools for updating your friends and family about your life or ranting about the state of the world. They can be a very effective communication tool for businesses for many reasons:
- Comments: readers can comment on posts. This is a great way to get free and quick feedback. However, with this ease comes a great responsibility on the part of the corporation. People reading and responding to blogs expect to be heard and that action will be taken to remedy any issues even if it is in the form of a response back from the company. Companies should monitor comments but not censor them. It is important to take the good comments with the bad and not to ignore negative comments but address them.
- Polls: instead of sending out surveys, why not just make a weekly poll on your corporate blog? Polls are an easy way to get information about your readership with just the click of a button.
- Blogroll: A blogroll is a great way to interact with readers and other corporations. The more blogs that are linked to yours, the more likely people are to stop by and check it out. One blogroll I especially like is on Google’s Official Blog. They have a list of blogs created and maintained by their users. This shows that they take the time to pay attention to their readership in the blogging community and allows interaction and linkativity between Google and it’s readers.
- RSS Feeds: People can subscribe to get updates on your corporate blog instantly. Without even having to search your site every day to see if anything has gone up on it they can get updates on their Google or Yahoo! Reader.
These are just a few ways blogs work interactively with their publics to reach and keep consumers.
For more information about the benefits of corporate blogging, check out this article by IT Business Edge.
Lauren, I really enjoyed this post! I especially liked how to made it clear that, though blogs are an excellent way for a corporation to interact with its key constituents through comments, they have to be willing to take those comments into consideration. This is a very important part of the blogging process because, as you mentioned, the people commenting expect to be heard and listened to. I also like that you mentioned Google’s blogroll. In the research that I have conducted so far, I have found their blogroll to be very effective and unique! The fact that you mentioned RSS feeds was also very important because they are what help keep a company’s readers coming back to the blog and experiencing the new content.
Good ideas! Because of our papers and previous research, I think a lot of our classmates would agree that these are important aspects of corporate blogs. But companies are still debating using blogs and I think it’s good to point out the ways that they can get customers and constituents involved – it’s a good selling point. I feel like blogs are a great source of interactivity for companies and a good way to keep people informally informed about news from the company. Great job and I can’t wait to hear more!
I liked how you broke down the different types of interactivity that can be used on corporate blogs in bullet points. It made the information clear and easy to read. One example that I hadn’t given much thought to before was using polls. This is an excellent way to get feedback from the readers of your blog. I feel like it is also a great way to increase reader participation on a blog. Some people may read the blog and not want to take the time to leave a comment, but answering a poll takes little effort and time. This also saves the corporation the time and expense that mailing or emailing a survey would take.