Corporate blogging

Recently, blogging has taken a sudden surge in the number of bloggers and the audience. I decided to do an independent research and take a look at “Corporate Blogging”. I shall summarize my findings in this blog. The motivation to undertake this effort comes from Steven Warren’s article – The Benefits of Corporate Blogging. This however complements the views expressed in that article.

Corporate blogging has emerged as an effective means of communication and they have emerged to remain an important instrument in the modern corporate tool kit. Blogging is no longer the cutting-edge phenomenon it was a few years ago. In fact, many executives, including CEOs have started blogging for some time now, like

Jonathan Schwartz , President & CEO of Sun Microsystems, the company I work for or Shai Agassi, President, SAP AG, another company I used to work for.

What makes blogging so popular is, if not for no other reason, its an informal way to reach out to a broader spectrum of audience and target your audience effectively. Corporate blogging has also been used as a marketing vehicle to roll out the latest news, strategic decisions, etc. as well as gain the consensus and inputs through comments from your audience. Leaders can communicate directly with customers, vendors, suppliers and investors, as well as employees, helping disseminate and explain strategy.

Simply put, its a complete round trip, from the board room to the grass root and back. This has made the classical press releases quite obsolete, though not entirely. Also, with the number of Internet users growing day-by-day and with powerful search engines and blogging tools, it has quite changed the mechanism. Additionally, corporate blogging is quite cost-effective.

Blogs port the diary format, which gives a sense of immediacy and regular posting has the tendency to create a standard documentation, which could in-turn be hyper-linked to extra relevant material. Not only should upper management make use of blog effectively, employees should also be empowered to blog. Take our case for example.

We started to work on our Code Camps, a developer-to-developer technical briefing sessions a year back. We used out blog to reach out to our software vendors and now, its has quite become a standard and a marketing platform. There are over 250 hits every day from all over the world. When employees are encouraged to blog, a ripple effect happens, thereby promoting your ideas gets faster, cheaper and broader.

Definitely, corporate blogging has come to stay.