As a business and marketing professional, we are tasked to find different ways to make a profit, find new customers and build the company brand.
In today’s Web 2.0 world, there’s a community out there filled with customers, special interests groups and business partners just waiting to be heard.
Take a quick inventory of your online assets, most websites today offer users’ stagnant content with no potential for interaction.
So, why create a corporate blog?
- To learn what your customers want
- Give your business a face online
- Bring the conversation inside the company
A company blog opens the door to listen and understand what your customers are saying. A company blog is a platform to provider visitors with fresh content and interact with community members.
There is, however, a fine line between company and community that the corporate blogger must walk. The challenge is providing an open communication channel to engage the community, while keeping in alignment with the corporation’s legal, brand and business standards.
We all wear many hats in our professional lives and the corporate blogger is no exception.
To be successful, a corporate blogger must be the:
- Communicator (editor)
- Facilitator (community builder)
- Negotiator (marketer)
Additionally, a good corporate blogger has attributes that contribute to success: They must be an active listener, an advocate for the company and an ambassador to the community.
Trust is key in building a social media community. To build trust, you must be open in your objectives and transparent within your communications.
How can a corporate blog be humanly authentic?
- The organization must know itself
- There must be internal and external alignment
- Create a platform and culture of passion
- By all means, always be honest
Each interaction with the blog has the potential to be direct, relevant and memorable for the community members. There are 12 additional points that need to be made. I will make them in my next post, so tune in at the same bat time, same bat channel.
I have just come across this site and it has great content, information and is interesting.I have read through a few pages here and thought I would drop a comment. I have to agree with you that having a blog, does help build up a company, its a great way to hear from ones clients what they like and don’t like. A way for us to become more hands on with our clients and to better our service and business. So in the long run both us as a business and the client get to benefit from this aspect.