Five Essential Boosts to Your Company Through Corporate Blogging

Control the Conversation

Traditional means of interacting with a company were rather distant. As a result, people turned directly to each other on far away forums and groups to discuss your company. That left your company out of the loop.

A blog with an active personality, a name, and a face, invites discussion, comments, and complaints to occur in a single environment. That makes you and your company part of the discussion. And people know that you're listening.

I also think part of a corporate blogger's responsibility is scouring the Internet looking for those stray conversations and (politely) inviting further discussion on the blog.

Pimp the Company

I think it is a mistake for a corporate blog to directly pimp the company, like a series of press releases.

The best approach for pimping a company is to let people know what's happening: bug fixes, new products, and so on, from a relaxed point of view, like a real customer. Not as a seller. You don't want to be selling on your blog.

The indirect approach is that people who come to your blog and hear about your products and site will naturally drift over to your site and products. And if the blogger gives the impression of being a mensch, the entire company is going to look like a mensch.

Bump Search Activity

Your website gets scanned more actively when you're creating new material every day. Blogs generate fresh material for search engines every day. Even better, if what you're writing is generally interesting to anybody, and not simply to people interested in your products or existing customers, you'll be getting links, traffic, and page rank boosts.

Lower Support Costs while Increasing Support

A blog is like a combination FAQ, forum, customer support, and sales brochure all rolled into one. If you've got a long blog and it's well organized, a lot of real customer questions will be answered well on the blog. That means fewer needless calls to customer service.

Make Better Products

Forums are good for fostering customer conversation, but blogs are even better. It's because they're not simply people talking to each other, but people talking to you while feeling like they're talking to each other.

If you're an agile company that wants to know what your customers want and don't want, a high volume blog is your best avenue.

Yehuda