Continued from “Blogging for Business pt 1″

So why is there so much fervor surrounding business blogs and corporate blogs? Unlike corporate websites, business blogs are extremely cost effective to launch and quite surprisingly easy to maintain, because there are so many powerful and easy to use tools out there. Unlike spam, junk e-mail and other forms of mass communication, corporate blogs are not intrusive, because they require visitors to get to them. When a corporate blog is done right, it provides a fast and informal way for information to be shared with a variety of different target audiences including partners within the company, customers and clients, and even other competing companies. The information that can be shared includes project updates, test results, research, product releases, news, industry headlines and so much more, and this information can be shared both inside the company and outside of the company as well.

However, it is important to know that blogs can be deceptively tricky when it comes to management. If you do not manage your business blog correctly, you could end up embarrassing yourself, boring your customers, or even alienating them. You may also accidentally contribute to the information overload, or may end up on the wrong side of a lawsuit if you do not exercise care and caution. Worse yet, you could potentially alienate the entire blogging community if you are not careful. Take for example what happened when Dr. Pepper/Seven Up Inc. tried to enlist young volunteers to plug the Raging Cow beverage on their blogs, but the effort backfired when other bloggers called for a product boycott because they were upset over the word of mouth campaign which was clearly orchestrated.

Successful business blogging, just like any other marketing campaign or initiative, is going to require that you put together and follow a strategy.

You absolutely need to be able to answer the 5 W’s regarding your corporate blog, meaning:

- Who is going to blog? Who is the target audience?
- What are we blogging for? What benefits are expected? What needs to be said? Restricted?
- Where will the blogs appear?
- When will the blogs appear? When will results be seen?
- Why are we doing this?

The last question here is possibly the most vital, because it will help you determine exactly what your blog is intended to accomplish. Are you looking to demonstrate the expertise of your company, or perhaps your own expertise? Are you looking to promote services or products, or provide customers with news, updates and announcements? Are you looking to facilitate communication or build a community? Answer these and other questions will help keep you out of trouble because you will have a clear cut idea of what needs to be said and done, and how to accomplish it. When these questions are answered, it will keep all of the blog writers in line, preventing the wrong steps from being taken to elevate your blog to popular status.

Photo Credits: 1

Originally posted 2009-01-14 05:13:07. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

• How to Avoid Corporate Blogging Disasters For those thinking about starting a corporate blog, there are a few caveats that should be considered before you ever throw your hat in the arena. The blogosphere can be a scary place if you are not prepared and it is easy to have a disaster of epic proportions on......
• How to Use Your Corporate Blog for Networking A corporate blog can be an incredible promotional tool, but it can also be used for networking purposes. Nearly every company can benefit from networking and much of the current internet community has been built on the back of social networking. How can you take advantage of this trend and......
• Three Must-Read Books for Corporate Bloggers Bloggers certainly love to read other blogs, but they also may be able to generate powerful resources from books on the subject of blogging. Here are three must read books for anyone who is serious about corporate blogging on a successful level. 1 - "The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything......
• Some Good Corporate Blogs It has become popular for businesses and companies of all types to express interest in creating a business blog so that they can better communicate with other companies, their customers, and a variety of other target markets out there. By looking at what corporate blogs are doing it right, and......
• Corporate Blogging Pitfalls It has been widely recognized that blogging is an excellent way to publish content to a website, and many corporations and other businesses are beginning to embrace this idea with a great amount of enthusiasm. Not only are companies creating corporate blogs, but sometimes a single employee blogs as well,......

• The last safe haven of the credit crunch now under attack It would be fair to say that the UK consumer is going through the toughest of times at the moment. What with inflation, deflation, house prices, unemployment and uncertainty, it seemed that all was left was to cry into his beer. Yet even that illusion has proved to be false......
• Why Big Companies Are Blogging? There are still some old school business people out there that consider the whole idea of blogging for their business rather ridiculous. Unfortunately for these people, they will never understand that the world is changing and blogging is a whole lot more than just a bunch of people in their......
• Social Media Optimization: Promote Your Business in an Easy Way Social media optimization is a new breakthrough in the world of internet. It has actually come into existence and people are using it to enhance their business. It is a fact that social media sites have got a great popularity in a short span of time. It is being used......
• Reasons to Start Blogging In the 1990's people started to set up websites know as web logs, a term which has been colloquially evolved into the term blog. A blog is a internet website where users post regular article, providing commentary, information, news, and various other forms of posts. Why do individuals start blogging?......
• The Beginners Guide to IVR - Interactive Voice Response The term IVR is short for Interactive Voice Response, which is a telephony technology that allows interaction between callers and a phone system to acquire or enter information into a database. More and more companies are turning to IVR to help reduce the cost of common sales, service, collections,......