- Connect with us:
- |
- |
- RSS
- |
- Newsletter
-
More than Just Blogging|
- By Pankaj Maru, Apr 16, 2008 1915 hrs IST
- Tags : When it comes to freedom of expression, majority of the corporate managers would definitely vouch for the Internet as the easiest way to speak, share and communicate one s thoughts and views across large masses around the world. Today, the Internet blog
-
One would not deny the fact that the number of people familiar with 'blogging' and using it - has exponentially grown against the years of blogging evolution. Today, writing blogs have become a routine activity for many net users just as checking emails every day.
Blogging has come a long way from the days of personal expressions - about one's thinking, attitude, ideology to raising voices against day to day social issues, in-human practices and creating mass awareness, and now it's a part of corporate culture and websites.
According to Kiruba Shankar, CEO of Business Blogging and founder director of F5ive Technologies, "Basically, blogging is an effective way of communication. In terms of corporate blogging, it's an active communication form adopted by companies and enterprises - to talk with their employees, investors, stake holders and customers.
"It (blog) keeps the corporate websites more active as readers get chance to read interesting articles, views and ideas about the products, services by the employees and other staff, along with news and other items," adds Shankar.
Talking of corporate blogging, MAIA Intelligence, based in Mumbai, has a corporate blog - Business Intelligence (BI). Sanjay Mehta, CEO of the company explains, "It is our team's sincere effort to aggregate, analyze and converse on issues relating to business intelligence reporting and analytics and, enterprise technology."
Further he continues, "We touch upon issues concerning use of business intelligence tools by CTO's and CIO's, the various benefits of BI tools, and why our products should be your choice for a BI!."
"It allows us to talk among ourselves, about our business, our products, services and solutions, our partners' expertise and customer case studies. Our blog facilitates dialogue around key enterprise application technology matters, business intelligence to provide useful information about trends, and other current events taking place throughout this space," adds Mehta.
Again, this does raise the key question about the benefits of corporate blogging.
About the benefits, director of (Solutions) MAIA Intelligence, Ashwin Dedhia says, "The blog's conversational nature is distinct to journalistic writing, and so this puts a human voice to the company. It will help build the 1KEY BI software product brand to be a thought leader in our BI industry, and also help in building brands for the company."
In addition, he points that a blog can pull you (company) over the competitors and can make a difference. Also, he call blogs as search traffic magnets and in technical terms, "Blogs are just content management systems, and just by writing an article a day, a business can very quickly build up a massive blog archive packed with keyword rich articles. Content is the food for search engine spiders, and the blog archives are the feast for the spider. And since you have fed them well, they are sure to return the favour and feed you with traffic."
Moreover, according to Dedhia, blogs help in engaging customers in conversation, building relationships, and visitors may submit postings and content suggestions.
"Media is key point for reaching out the mass. While a company has to hire a market research firm to review the business strategy, blogs help corporates keep active track of customers, get their feedbacks, suggestions, opinions and also help keep the trust of stake holders and investors," says Rajesh Lalwani, founder of Blogworks. The firm provides strategic social media solutions for corporate blogging.
"Corporates can build their product brands and promote services in far more effective and cheaper way, compared to any form of media advertisements. Blog is a transparent tool for 1-to-1 interaction, and since most corporate blogs are written in first person - 'I' - it generates enormous faith, value and recognition among the readers (customers, vendors, investors)," adds Lalwani.
The freedom of expression has made blogs highly popular among the media, but there's no such freedom in corporate blogging. "No companies would allow its employees or staff to write or post comments - that are against or not aligned with its business policies and systems. Corporates are bound to exercise censorship, and so blogs have to be written keeping in view the company polices and culture," he stresses on.
Vikram Kole, head of (Marketing) MAIA Intelligence, also accepts this fact. "On MAIA blog, we ask our employees to post their articles through their own login ID and password provided, which is automatically saved in draft mode. The blog administrator then reviews the complete article in terms of views and points expressed, whether they are as per or against the company policy, etc.," Kole clarifies.
"And accordingly he gets the necessary corrections done in the article from the author and only then the article is published. We definitely have to keep check on the articles that are being posted on our corporate blog," he adds.
Interestingly, Kole advocates the setting of guidelines and corporate blogging policy for employees. "No one will want them revealing proprietary information or any other details. In any event, not having a corporate blogging policy allows employees to cross the line, even if they do not have those intentions. Once the blogging policy is created, release it within your company, sit back awhile and watch the excitement grow - as you allow your partners and employees to share their passions with others," he opines.
However, the practice of corporate blogging is not highly popular in India. "Corporate blogging is still at the nascent stage here. It will take some more years to grow. Because of the immaturity, there are no standard guidelines followed yet, and so companies undertake their own set of rules for blogging," Lalwani says.
Even in this nascent stage, Mehta is confident and positive about corporate blogging, and its promotion. "We would encourage our employees to blog. We want our enterprise or prospective customers to read, and communicate with our product developers and designers. When employees' blog, there's the exchange of ideas about the products with the customers, and in the process employees can get new ideas, links, and help in gaining higher productivity and turn the customers into evangelists," he concludes.
Related Links:
Corporate Blogs are Catching on
-
Discussion Board
- Write a message
