Build a corporate blog good marketing

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Compared to traditional media advertising or corporate website promotion, corporate blog has many advantages: it is not abrupt, can directly learn the customer opinion, help enterprises to establish the image of innovators. Even if your business does not need to create a corporate blog immediately, it needs to be sensitive to business-related comments in the blogosphere, because in the age of consumer authoring, it is essential to try new ways to keep in touch with customers.

Over the past five years, blogs have had the highest growth rate in all web-based applications, such as e-mail, online forums, and so on. Users can build their own blog within 15 minutes without having to master any special functions to easily update their blogs. The blog's access traffic is much easier to improve than regular sites, which makes it a high ranking in the Web search engine statistics. Many companies are aware of this phenomenon and are starting to create corporate blogs.

There are many kinds of corporate blogs: blogs for brands, blogs for companies and employees, etc. Corporate blogging has many benefits-it's not abrupt, it can get feedback directly from customers, it drives the expansion of the human network, it helps companies build up the image of innovators, and so on.

Yes or no?

While the benefits of corporate blogging seem obvious, the reality is that businesses with their own blogs are still in the minority. According to the survey, only 8% of Fortune 1000 companies claim to have their own corporate blogs. The main reason seems to be that blogs are more risky than other corporate communications tools. Corporate blogs, unlike advertising or corporate websites, have the risk of being publicly criticized in the blog space or the blogosphere. And this criticism is easy to spread online, damaging corporate image. While corporate CEOs know the benefits of blogging, most CEOs remain on the sidelines for corporate blogs due to time constraints and public speaking concerns.

So before you create a blog, the manager needs to think about whether you really need a corporate blog. If needed, they should also address two important questions: who will be the owner of the enterprise, and what features the corporate blog should have.

A blog is a communication tool for a specific audience. Before creating a corporate blog, managers should know whether people who are closely related to the company's interests are really looking for information about their businesses and their products and services in their blogs. Blogs are popular among young people who regularly post comments and read all of their blogs, according to Pewinternetamericanlifeproject, a market research firm Forrester and Pew's "Network and American Life Project" report. So, corporate blogs may be a good way for companies to keep in touch with this group of people. However, it is not possible for a middle-aged professional to learn a product or event through a blog. In the business world, product blogs are very popular, especially with regard to information and communication technology. In the IT product blog, professionals not only exchange views, but also usually make purchase decisions based on the information they receive on their blogs. A recent study by Universalmccann, an advantage, emphasizes that the content of blogs greatly affects the purchasing decisions of IT products. More than 50% per cent said that the content of the blogs they read affected their work-related buying decisions. So the key step in creating a corporate blog is to quickly study the interest of people who are closely related to the company's interests.

If the company thinks blogging is a good communication tool, the next step is to decide whether the company itself or someone else will be the blogger. Recent research has shown that when people are looking for information about a company, they prefer to trust someone else's blog rather than the company's own blog. In view of this, some companies choose to be the company's core staff to write a blog. In a recent study, Edelman (Edelman), a communications consultant, found that positive reviews of employees ' perceptions of the company and its products and services are more influential than those of external blogs or traditional media. But the key to winning trust is that his/her comments on the company must be derogatory and not just a PR activity. For example, Bob Lutz, vice president of General Motors, has launched his own blog, "The Fast Lane (Fastlane)". The blog's visit is very good, car enthusiasts in the blog to write a lot of advice and complaints, Luz often in the blog to acknowledge the failure of the company, and on how to solve the existing problems to suggest ways.

During the creation of a corporate blog, it is also important to determine what issues the blog addresses: whether it is related to the enterprise, or whether it is a product-related issue or a customer's concern. The decision of the enterprise to the content of the blog depends to a great extent on the communication and marketing policy of the enterprise. For example, the two companies of Honeywell (Honeywell) and Wells Fargo (Fargo) have strong corporate brands, each with their own successful corporate blogs, and software company Macromedia's blog for specific products, Its reputation comes almost entirely from both the Acrobat and Flash products. Macromedia The company has only a rule--the content of the post to be related to the product, in addition, the company's bloggers have full discretion. In view of the blog is a communication tool, blog users online is to find specific information, corporate blog should reflect the positioning of enterprises in the market. If the enterprise has a strong brand, consumers can identify the company's products and the name of the product and the company, creating a corporate blog to name the enterprise may be better, otherwise, we recommend using a specific product name to create a corporate blog.

The third issue of Enterprise blog design is to consider the function and characteristics of the blog. We find that the most visited corporate blogs have the following characteristics:

Create your own URLs for blogs

Use multiple authors who articulate organizational mission

Provides internal search capabilities

Link to the home page of the enterprise from anywhere in the blog

It pays to be proactive

If you think corporate blogs are a good idea, don't just be a reader, the company can start blogging by posting on someone else's blog. For example, if the blog has questions about the company's products, the company can reply to the post and make a suggestion on how to solve the problem. This is not only a good PR, but also show the company's commitment.

Another option is to create brand awareness through bloggers, the author of the blog. The advantage of marketing through bloggers is that they have an ongoing, independent interest in a topic. Bloggers often comment on news that appears in the mass media, so the comments that surround an event tend to spread as bloggers discuss them. In view of this, the marketing strategy to promote brand awareness can be as follows: The company organizes an activity that may be reported by the mass media, and these reports may become the focus of many blog discussions. Vueling, for example, has received extensive news coverage through its many different promotional activities, notably Vueling's No. 5 million customer, who received a free round-trip ticket from the company, who could go anywhere on the Vueling route with her 100 friends. The event was a great success because the story was widely reported in traditional media and the blogosphere has had a lot of discussion around the story.

What not to do

Blogs are considered one of the most trusted sources of information on the web, and many Internet users actually look for information on blogs. As a result, some companies make fake blogs to promote their brands. Fake blogs are not only immoral, but often counterproductive. If a fake blog is found by bloggers or journalists, the negative comments surrounding the brand will be like wildfire. At the end of 2006, for example, there was a blog in the blogosphere called "Christmas I Want is a PSP (Sony's gaming platform)." This blog is issued in the name of a teenager, Charlie, whose hobby is "Hip-Hop and computer games", and wants a PSP on Christmas Day, and one of his friends named Jeremy is determined to help him get one. The blog is linked to a series of video works that are thought to be created by amateurs, with the same goals, which embody "friends". But paranoid netizens found that the site was registered with a marketing company called Zipatoni, while Sony's PlayStation (home integrated computer entertainment platform) brand was listed on the company's Web page's client list. When netizens discovered that these videos and "Charlie" blogs were advertising campaigns, the internet launched a criticism. The campaign has had a bad effect in the game, and the newspapers have criticized it, and Sony has since modified its website to acknowledge the true purpose of the blog.

Measure the performance of a blog

When planning a corporate blog, fully consider the specific measures to measure the performance of the blog. We need to know whether the corporate blog generates a return on investment. Since blogging can be set up for different purposes, quantifying the benefits of blogging is a daunting task. Wherever possible, companies should choose metrics that measure the performance of their blogs, which can be compared to financial results, so that companies can assess and weigh the investment and financial returns of their blogs. If the Enterprise blog is about the product or service, it can be based on the blog's key potential customers to calculate the revenue, this information can be obtained through the analysis of access traffic. If the cost of the blogging platform, training, policy formulation and staff time spent are lower than the revenue generated by the key potential of the blog, it is worthwhile to set up a corporate blog.

Other factors that are unique to the design of the blog, such as the frequency of postings, RSS feeds and multimedia applications, have no significant correlation with blogging success. The last point is the content of the blog, although the quality of the content is difficult to evaluate, but it is the main feature of the success of the blog. We found that the number of corporate blogs hosted by well-known experts in a field was high; it follows that knowledge, reputation and expertise are the three related issues to consider when choosing a corporate blogger.

Do not blog, then monitor the blog circle

Corporate blogs are useful, but that doesn't mean it's necessary, it's important to monitor the blogosphere regularly. Monitoring blogs is becoming an integral part of brand management. Taking Vueling, the low-cost European airline, for example, they regularly analyze major blogs about tourism and airlines to check consumer brand perceptions. To this end, Vueling company specifically set up a communications department to accurately retrieve people in the blog on the company's brand evaluation.

There are different ways to track comments on a blog that are related to a company. The first approach is to use a blog search engine, such as Bloglines, through which the company can find topics of interest to them. These search engines also enable companies to set up personalized search feeds (customfeeds) to monitor each blog that contains keywords, such as the company's name or brand. Another more accurate but also more expensive approach is to use agency services to check the blogosphere. In this way, enterprises can not only track the frequency and tone of blog posts, but also to investigate the overall impact of the blog on traditional media. Thus, enterprises can evaluate the effect of traditional advertising methods and the new media of "customer production" in the aspect of brand cognition.

However, different industries have different views on key potential customers. For example, in the ICT industry, 70% of bloggers are recommending or forwarding what they see at least once a month, and many companies in the industry can identify who will be customers because they have access to information through their corporate blogs. But companies in other industries are unlikely to identify potential customers from corporate blogs. Like the purpose of advertising and promotional activities, corporate blogs in the consumer goods industry are often designed to enhance brand awareness and brand image. To this end, companies often use a variety of multimedia and dissemination of resources (such as video, podcasts (video sharing), online forums, etc.) to locate the company's brand. A successful corporate blog enables potential customers to consider buying the product of the enterprise. From considering buying to actual purchase is a small step, however, it is almost impossible to determine whether a blog is actually bringing this potential customer, because most consumer goods are sold through a retailer, and it is rare to ask consumers how to learn about the product in a retail store, and, in most cases, Consumers are confused about where to get product information (advertising, promotional activities, blogs, etc.).

Therefore, in the enterprise to end consumer this scenario, the potential customer is not a good measure of blog performance indicators. Because in most cases, companies do not recognize these potential customers. Our proposal is to establish a brand awareness index from the blog, the main source of information can be the Web site traffic analysis (including such as the number of visits to the blog, the amount of postings and other data). Along this line, companies can compare the brand awareness of corporate blogs to the brand perceptions that they produce.

If the company decides to set up a corporate blog for customer service, the benefits of the blog can be measured by a reduction in the number of calls to the corporate call center. As with many of the Web site FAQs (FAQ) sections, many of the previous questions and answers were public on the corporate blog for customer service, so anyone interested in a particular issue could find the information they wanted here. If the corporate blog for customer service can reduce the workload of the call center, then there is reason to think that the blog is successful.

Perhaps your company does not need to create a corporate blog at the moment, but it must focus on the dynamics of the blogosphere in order to monitor the company's brand health, get improved customer service and improve product development new ideas. In this era of consumer authoring, it is essential to try new ways to keep in touch with customers and other stakeholders.