What's stopping you from blogging?
weekly roundup If personal blogs are a way to keep society in check, then corporate blogs can be a useful resource for companies to connect with society--be it their employees, partners or clients.
The number of blogs is currently more than 60 times higher than what it was three years ago, where a new blog is created every second each day.
According to analyst company Forrester Research, 5 percent of online consumers read blogs regularly in 2004, compared to 2 percent in 2003. I'm pretty sure the figure today is closer to 10 percent.
So, I'm surprised that, according to a recent study, only 3 percent of some 2,300 businesses polled planned to use blogs to attract traffic to their corporate sites and increase sales.
When done right and under the proper guidelines, corporate blogs provide a great platform for companies to discuss their business plans/directions and product roadmaps with the public in any way they choose--without having to worry about how that same piece of news will be filtered and presented by the media and the likes.
More than just a cheap marketing tool, corporate blogs can also help build a more intimate relationship with your customers and business partners, and allow the company's top-level executives to appear more accessible.
One of the IT industry's most illustrious bloggers is Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz, who incidentally in his Oct. 2 blog entry, touched on the use of blogs to discuss a company's financial results. Schwartz's blog, along with over 4,000 blogs of Sun employees, help pull nearly a million hits per day to the company's corporate site.
One million page views daily--not too bad for a day's work. So what's stopping your company from starting a corporate blog?
In other news this week, the hacker who said he identified a zero-day bug in Firefox did an about-turn. Find out why software vendors that still sell out of a box won't be too happy with this week's news, and how Hewlett-Packard and Sony are likely to remain friends.