Corporate Blogging: A new marketing communication tool for companies.

Now in this computer age, blogging which started off as a forum for teenagers to express themselves, has now reached the corporate and has become very popular among businesses of all sizes. Companies like General Motors, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems have recognized the effects and importance of blogging and are now using them as a communicate tool within their customers and employees. Nowadays, corporate blogging has become a communication tool that widely used by organization to achieve its organizational goal.

Corporate blogging lets the organization communicate with their customers, employees, the media, prospective employees in a more personal and direct way. Through blogging, an organization can build its relationship with its customers and promote their products at the same time. Corporate blogging can also be effectively used to communicate with the public. Corporate can even conduct their public relations activities through blogging by posting press releases and updates about new company products and services on the blog. Besides that Corporate blogging can also be used as a method of employee recruitment. The organization can post a blog on available job openings and requirements, which will help in the recruitment process.

Fastlane Blog is one of the General Motors’ blog. Fastlane Blog is a great example of corporate blogging because GM has clearly realized that regurgitating press releases is not what blogs are made for. GM talks a lot on their blog about their cars and trucks and the design choices they make while creating them, but they also throw in interesting treatises on current hot-button issues, such as alternative energy

GM FastLane link: http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/

The pros of corporate blogging is that if the corporate structure is a building, then blogs serve as the windows that allow customers to peer inside and see what is happening internally with greater precision than ever before. It can help the companies to expand their horizon world-wide. It increases the potential of the company by increasing its communication structure. Besides that, corporate blogging also can save the cost of the company in publicizing as compared to paperwork publicizing.

Although there are many pros in Corporate blogging but it has its own cons too. The corporate blogs should be professionally written. Poorly written blogs can be misleading to the public. Their information can be misunderstood or ill judged by public or by the clients and investors. They may start doubting on the authenticity of the company and may be hazardous to the company. Besides, in a world that is increasingly litigation happy, blogs might make it too easy for defamation and invasion of privacy or to breach information security.