Corporate blogging: A new marketing communication tool for companies

A corporate weblog is published and used by an organization to reach its organizational goals. Corporate blogging is being used as a new marketing communication tool for companies. Corporate blogging can provide clear guidelines of overall marketing or communication strategy to its employees and third parties. In other ways, blogs are fast way to join the customers' discussions, provide tips and insights or receive feedback, thus they improve the customer relationship.


Advantages of corporate blog:
Corporate blogging give the writer an opportunity to answer critics in a controlled forum. Good blogs may even effectively use moderated comments to allow users of the product to post feedback and effectively use links to take visitors to other sites that they would find helpful. Beside that, posts and comments are easy to reach and follow due to centralized hosting and generally structured conversation threads.

Disadvantages of corporate blog:
However, corporate blogging might make it easy for defamation and invasion of privacy or to breach information security and loss of company confidentiality. In addition, the corporate blog can be tricky to drag public comment out of a company without first routing through the sanitizing filter of a press office and there is a risk that an ill-judged comment could be seized upon by the media or disgruntled investors.

Examples of corporate blog include:
Company Blog (eg.Google, Adobe, Flickr, Facebook, and Yahoo! Search), CEO Blog (eg.Sun CEO), Industry Blog and Department or Product Blog (eg.Microsoft Community Blogs). Although there are many different types of corporate blogs, most can be categorized as either external or internal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_blog
http://www.enterpriseblogs.info/corporate-blogging/disadvantages
http://www.enterpriseblogs.info/corporate-blogging/advantages