Top 16 Reasons to start an External Corporate Blog
- Blogging software makes it very easy even for non-technical users to create and add content in minutes; no knowledge of programming or html is required.
- Provides a direct line to interact with your users, especially with the enthusiasts; you can connect with them at a more personal level than with any other medium.
- Enables you to create a community around your brand/product/service. This community can be used to launch user groups and harness your customers' knowledge to help each other and to help you. It's also a great place to provide product usage tips and tricks.
- Get rapid and valuable feedback from the user community or start a discussion, e.g. What are we doing wrong? What are we doing right? What difficulties do users have? What's in the works and coming up?
- All of these things - a connection with the customer, a sense of community around the product or service, and responsiveness to customer feedback - work together to increase and cement customer loyalty to your business.
- Users with feeds will get this content "pushed" to them, which is a significant improvement over the "interruption-driven" model used by traditional advertising.
- Blog content can be connected directly to the company news pages, which provides automatic content on a regular basis to keep the web site fresh. This keeps users engaged and also helps with SEO ranking.
- Bloggers link to and get linked from other blogs, which has a viral effect and promotes SEO rankings.
- The blog can be used to survey the user community (via formal survey questions or informally via postings), providing input to key business decisions
- The company blog can be a more informal communication medium than most corporate communications, so you can touch on more delicate (but still appropriate) topics, such as explaining the additional enhancements you're making that caused the ship date to slip.
- Provides an opportunity for guest writing by the CEO, Executives, power users and industry experts. (But be careful to provide some constraints on the content; see the Top Mistakes to avoid in an external corporate blog for more details.)
- Generate word-of-mouth buzz in your industry or community; announce news, changes, features, even apologize if necessary.
- Get recognized as a thought leader in your business area.
- A blog gives prospective candidates and the broader community more exposure to your business; if the blog is highly positive and the content provides value, then this could have a very positive effect on your recruiting pipeline.
- In the end, it's another channel for marketing communication, one that allows you to reach out to a large user community at very low cost.
- Google and Yahoo do it - 'nuff said!
1. Ease of use
2. Connect
3. Community
4. Feedback
5. Increased customer loyalty
6. Push model
7. Freshness
8. Trackbacks
9. Surveys
10. Informal tone
11. Guest writers
12. Buzz
13. Thought leadership
14. Recruiting
15. Channel
16. Follow the leaders
