What this blog is not about...

Corporate Blogging is a huge topic. Evaluating its effectiveness for businesses can be approached from several angles. To understand why, it can help to take a closer look at what exactly makes a Weblog a Corporate Blog.

At first glance, it seems corporate blogs are nothing more than blogs published by a company. That is incorrect.

Have you got any idea how many company-authored weblogs you can find on the web?

Even a blog residing on the same subdomain (e.g. http://blog.companydomain.co.uk) does not automatically make it corporate. Take all those company blogs that just rehash or bookmark information on topics that are related to their line of business.

YES, it is true to say that a Corporate Blog is published by a company. But NO, it is not the company behind each and every post, i.e. the marketing department. It is the people in this company who write blogposts.

Blogging is not about painting a big picture, it's about what people have to say. Remember how we explained in our post on the definition of weblogs that it's all about personal communication. Delivering content that is related to the company's daily business and at the same time being personal. Making this oxymoron work in a company blog is what truly defines it as being corporate.

That brings us to a second characteristic. One that may distinguish corporate blogging from private blogging simply because in one of its variations it does not exist for noncorporate blogs: Accessibility! Whilst private blogsites live and thrive on being online, corporateblogs don't even have to be publicly accessible!

Debbie Weil, author of the Book "The Corporate Blogging Book" is utterly convinced that there are a lot more corporate blogs in protected company intranets than public ones. At first, this may seem a little absurd. But the use of being company internal becomes apparent if you look at the goals of these internal weblogs that are shielded from the outside world through a firewall. Admittedly, these goals do bend the originally intended purpose of weblogs rather strongly, but judge for yourself:

Internal Coprorate Blogs can be used as a collaboration tool for

• Knowledge and Information Management
  Imagine every department had their own blog. And every single colleague could and would contribute information that he or she thinks is relevant. How often have I discovered that a colleague had been previously working on and solved the very same problem I'd decided to try to resolve. Of course, knowing this beforehand would have saved me a great deal of time and effort. Use blogs to document insider information such as solutions to problems or brainstorming ideas. That way blogs can be utilised as an easy-to-use platform for sharing knowhow with everybody else so that future work can be done more efficiently.


• News Publication
  How many mails do you get per day? And what gets deleted first? Exactly, newsletters! Weblogs can replace Email-Newsletters. Issue news on blogs and people will visit whenever they are interested. They will always see the latest news as well as previous publications. Those who want to keep up-to-date permanently can subscribe to the newsfeed.
  


• Project Management
  Depending on the size of a project there can be a lot of processes involved in managing it. Document and coordinate them through a project related weblog. Coordinate appointments and post meeting minutes. Give status updates. That way project team members as well as project requestors can be kept up to speed.
  
  
• Customer Relationship Management
  If Customer Orientation means anything to your company, why not use blogs to publish and share information related to customers, phone calls, client visits.
  

Whilst internal blogging is an ideal opportunity for large companies to test how the use and concept of weblogs is accepted within their company, it is practically irrelevant for small businesses since its utilisation will most likely only be efficient in business environments that require a great amount of coordination between a large number of people.

That, plus the fact that we as a company in the area of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) have an interest in studying the effectiveness of public Corporate Blogs, is the reason why we will not ellaborate any further on the concept of internal corporate blogs.