Thursday, December 11, 2008

Blogging: Helpful Tips for Corporate Blogging

by Nicholas Tan

Blogs are massive resources of information from both inside and outside companies. Businessmen survive the world of blogging because they know how and where to dig information while protecting their own secrets. Although blogging can be risky world for businesses, there are several helpful tips that can help bring success to corporate blogging.
The Important of Training It is important to make sure the members of the communications team. In the past, this team was composed of a small group. However, with the advent of blogging, everyone who blogs at the company is spreading a specific message about the company. People who handle the blogging for the company must be trained to avoid any spill of unnecessary information.
If by accident, important information regarding the company has been disclosed, this can put the company under the watchful eyes of the regulators. More so, inappropriate leaks can provide competitors with leverage and may lead to embarrassing revelations about the inner workings of the company and its staff.
Although the usual action to be taken is to restrict employees from blogging, this can be a shortsighted decision. Bloggers from within the company can easily relate and make contact with potential clients and even enhance the brand of the company.
The Fake Blogs Several, if not all, companies are eager to establish one-on-one links with their consumers, though they are often hesitant to venture in the world of blogging. As a result, they set up fake blogs. Fake blogs are those that are created by marketing departments of the company in order to promote a product, brand or service using a fake name or character.
These kinds of blogs are risky since several bloggers who are passionate about what they do view them as an insult to the blogging community and no one can deny the fact that these blogs are very visible to the public.
Although there are no rules prohibiting a company from making pseudo-blogs, the subject of creating one is always welcome. Always keep in mind that you can choose to create fake blogs but remember all the risks involved.
Blog Tracking
Tracking blogs is one of the easiest and most important tips to remember. Firstly, the company can look around online and search for the most influential blogger who writes about their products or services. Remember to read the blogger's updates everyday and perform an automated tracking of discussions.
Tracking blogs is important because even those postings from small-time bloggers can be selected by search engines, strengthened by a well-known blogger and ultimately hit the mainstream.
The Public Relations
Blogs have the ability to break down barriers between the company and its customers. It is important for businesses to take that into consideration and adjust. There are several companies that start blog in order to attain customer loyalty and address the customers' concerns and comments. Relating to the customers is a vital factor in the survival of a business. Knowing what the customers think about the products or services can help enhance the company's services.
The Company's Secrets
Take into consideration one secret or secrets that you have kept at your company. Be it a list of projects for the following year or information about scandalous activities, there are several things that you must learn no to leak to your competitors.
In blogging, there is a certainty that you must rethink about something that you are trying to avoid, for that fact that other companies are increasingly sharing information to win new partners and generate new ideas. Although this does not mean that they are not keeping any secrets from you or that you must not keep any from them, it is important to reevaluate whether you can gain more out of sharing details than keep them to yourself.

Blogging: How to Plan Your Blog

by Nicholas Tan

The basics of blogging cover all the basic essentials, including your writing style, blog category and the content of your blog. Planning your blog can be difficult if you do not know what you want to talk about. It could be extra hard if you do not have the necessary background in blogging. However, knowing what you want to blog about can easily come to you once you start browsing and poking around other blogs. You can pick ideas from those blogs, expound and make them the basis of your blog.
The Blogging Categories
Generally, there are several types of blogs. Nevertheless, there are three popular categories of blogs, such as: the organizational, business and personal blogs.
The first category, the organization, uses the power of blogs to communicate either externally with the public or internally within their organizations. This kind of blog has the purpose of facilitation internal communications amongst employees, colleagues and other organizational personnel. In addition, organizational blogs normally publish information that is of interest by the public. In a certain instance, there are organizational blogs that publish seminar schedules, meetings, and announcements for their clients, customers or members.
The business blogs, on the other hand, are for promoting services or products offered by businesses in order to help increase profits, revenue and interest of potential consumers. These kinds of blogs can look for ways to increase their reputation and authority with vendors, customers and partners. They do this by publishing contents that express expertise and knowledge within a specific market portion, niche or industry.
The personal blogs are those that contain contents that are more of a reflection of bloggers' opinions and thoughts. Normally, they are used to publish articles that voice their points of view on several kinds and varieties of events and topics. Bloggers who publish personal contents usually find pleasure in documenting their everyday lives, stream of consciousness and even their hate to specific events through articles that reflects their moods.
The Target Audience
Your target audience and blogging style comes hand in hand. The moment you think of creating your own blog, you must first realize what your target audience is; you must know what they want, need and desire to read about. The blog you create and the contents you publish must provide quality and value to the readers in order to be effective in establishing communication and expanding readership.
More so, the kind of blog you want to create essentially creates its own target audience. For instance, an organizational blog is meant for those who are members or clients of a certain organization. Although the target audience may be limited, there is a good chance for consistency with regards to the dialogue you create with your readers and eventually more people would be interested in your blog.
The mentioned personal blogs are not normally designed for social dialogue with a certain target readership of any category and is rather meant to serve as a collection of your musings. These kinds of blogs are best reserved to your close friends and they are your target audience.
If you identify your target audience successfully, your messages that you want everyone to know about will be effectively targeted. Some of the greatest joys of blogging come from the use of your enthusiasm in publishing signification information for a community where there is a free exchange of opinions between the readers and you.