Business Blogs

Blogs have increasingly gained huge popularity and use in the past few years, in particular corporate blogs that target the market or the internal corporate organization. According to Eva M. Lang, blogging means a communication tool, a marketing technique, a listening device and a way to interact directly with customers one-to-one on a global scale.

According to the article 10 Big Benefits of a Busy Business Blog, blogging for any type of business, small or big, can surely be beneficial. It gives the business the opportunity to build an online community and share its information with a larger public. Like Alyssa Gregory said, whether the blog is made for the potential customers of the company or the employees and administration of the company, the blog facilitates the communication of information around.

If a blog was constructed for the employees, it would certainly be targeted to enhance and improve the operations and the business strategies applied by the management. Internally, as Ville Farah said, many organizations are using blogs for internal communication, collaboration, and knowledge sharing and management. On the other hand, for a blog created to communicate information about products and their qualifications and services to customers, then it would be a strong marketing tool. Nowadays, in the “Internet era”, blogging is one of the most powerful tools for gaining market share. In addition to that, blogging is a lower cost alternative for a web html, especially for small businesses who wouldn’t have the budget to spend on developing a website. This is applicable for any type of business. Making use of a feed burner (via RSS) saves time and bookmarking. Ajaero Martins explains that by blogging, a business can enhance its profile on the web and increase visits to its site by a lot. It is cheap for marketing and public relations purposes. A business can also gain benefit of the information or the posts it makes on its own blog to prepare its presentations, reports and proposals. A business can significantly expand by blogging by finding new partners through the web. The benefits of blogs to users are social in addition to informational, and connecting with the community is a value sought after by businesses.

For the construction of a blog, it is important to use the standardized approach of RUBRIC for which the elements are reliability, usability, behavior, reflection, information, and creativity. Those factors are intended to lay a foundation from which academics and corporate communicators can begin to build and use blogs knowing their work will be evaluated and assessed using a standard criterion. To build a blog, a company has to select a blog publisher, create an account and start adding content. Bloggers must stick to the golden rule of blogging: "They must update frequently." Low entry costs make blogging accessible to small businesses, and a basic blog is simple to create and to update, requiring no special technical skills. Blog services provide software to facilitate building a basic blog. Having a blog, which is regularly filled with quality content, can benefit your business in many ways.

One can summarize blog benefits in the following: search engine friendly, easy way of communication, brand building, product differentiation, social media, management of reputation, low costs, tracking of customer interests and feedback and better positioning. Hence, a business should take on the challenge of operating a corporate blog.