Blog As Your Corporate Face
Most people, such as myself, blog just for pleasure and probably sometime showcasing ourselves to people who is interested on our fields. Over the last couple of years, the population of blogosphere is increasing rapidly. Now there are more than 1 blog created every second.
People love blogging because it’s easy to use. People also love reading blogs simply because it’s personal. It’s different than any other cold corporate website that’s ever existed before, blog caters to its readers needs. It even allows readers to interact with the editor of the site and creating a two way communication.
On top of that, blog is relatively more trustable than the ordinary corporate site. Take examples blog that is created by microsoft’s employee such as Scoble or Google’s blog. People come to it, and leave comments on it, sometimes it creates buzz that is easier to believe by the ‘common’ people. And that’s what makes blog a useful PR tool for your company and that’s why it is a necessity to make blog as a corporate face for your company (on your site that is). We’ll show you how.
Blogging Platform - in order to create a robust blog, you will need to build it on top of a robust system. I’m talking about a good blogging software to create your blog with it. My top pick should go with Wordpress. They have an excellent community in which you can draw support from there, and they also support a mass blogging platform using WordPress MU (will be fully launched soon). And they are free (it is especially important if you are tight on the budget). There are other alternative that I can suggest: Movabletype and Textpattern. Those three giants are the one who’s fighting for the marketshare right now.
Hosting Provider - It is always irritating to open a slow-loading site and a company blog should have a fast loading time as possible (balanced with the budget of course). According to my personal experience, you can go with Site5’s offer on hosting if you are running on a budget. If your corporate blog is getting big in size and traffic, you can later switch on a better package by MediaTemple.
Original Content - your blog is nothing without original content. People come to your company’s blog to read about your insights about what’s going on in your industry, not a copy - paste materials that you acquire from ZDNet. It’s about authenticity, content is king. I suggest, it will be better to draw the blogger from your own staffs since it will give an original insights of what they are doing. When you hire someone to blog about your company or your product, at the very moment you lie to your visitors. And once you lied, the word will create a buzz you can’t handle and will give a negative impact on your company’s image.
Corporate Policy - you have the site ready and geared up, you have a high quality content, now you have to prepare for the worst: information leak. It is inevitable that sensitive information regarding your company can be leaked (accidentaly) via blog. To prevent this from happening, you have to create a boundaries on which content can be published and which can’t. I know it’s a bit restrictive this way and might make you look like a dictator, but restriction in this case is for your own good. Who says that there’s a democracy on corporatocracy?
Increasing Traffic - a blog without traffic is like creating a publicity stunt without anyone watching. It’s a waste of money. In order to drive more traffic to your company’s blog, you can read this nice article by Entrepreneur Magazine. In order to increase your traffic using the new web 2.0 (del.icio.us, technorati, etc), you can visit Paul Stamatiou on how to increase your blog traffic.
