Starting A Cleaning Business - Corporate Blogs - Why Businesses Must Lose the Blogging Fear Factor

While from the mid-1990s corporate websites emerged as the must-have business tool, the 1980s saw the dawn both of personal computers and desktop publishing. And become early adopters of new technologies and strategies, some companies are by nature more forward looking than others.

As if they were an alien species harbouring plans of world domination, and many businesses viewed the highly paid techies who built websites with suspicion, websites were a largely unknown quantity, yet at the start of the 90s.

And is a crucial way to reinforce brand values and engage customers, because a website is an organization's public face, it's unthinkable that a business would opt not to have a website, of course, today.

Organizations are again facing another technology-driven revolution: social media, as we head into a new decade.

In the guise of corporate blogs, and increasingly they expect their favourite brands to follow suit, blogging has long been accepted and embraced by people as a valid and effective way to communicate with fellow earthlings. Yet it's been around since the early 1990s - almost as long as the internet itself, many organisations regard blogging as a new-fangled phenomenon.

The benefits are well documented (see an earlier article "Corporate Blogging - Why a Business Blog Should Be Part of the Marketing Mix" (twurl.nl/6oqauo). Particularly corporate blogging, advertising and PR opportunities offered by social media, but far more companies ought to be embracing the marketing, corporate blogging may not fit every business model.

We also outline reasons why these fears are unfounded. Below we list three common misgivings businesses cite regarding corporate blogging.

Corporate blogging fears 1: Blogs take up too much time.

People find time, and where there is passion, whatever subject they tackle, the truth is that successful blogs are passionate blogs. But show me a marketing strategy that does not eat up time. There's no escaping the fact that running a good corporate blog takes time.

These are people whose writing is typically driven by the same passion that fuels their daily business lives. MD or CEO - will be the ones penning corporate blogs, such as the founding partner, senior people, in small organizations.

Their visibility at work and their marketability as an employee, because it bolsters their job satisfaction, most organizations will find many employees are only too happy to volunteer their services as corporate bloggers. So spreading the load, in larger organisations blogs are commonly crafted by a team of people.

Corporate blogging fears 2: Blogging will distract employees

Yet email and blogging are really just flip sides of the same coin. How much time do your people squander on inappropriate or ineffective use of email as a communications tool? And what about email? Blogs are just websites, because after all, if you fear blogging as a distraction to staff you must also be uncomfortable with employees using the internet for professional purposes, presumably.

Appreciate corporate blogging for what it is - an internet-based marketing tool - and you'll be well placed to explore its potential.

Corporate blogging fears 3: Blogs mean negative feedback from customers

Negative and positive, a corporate blog is invaluable for harvesting customer insight, by giving customers a platform to voice an opinion on your products or services. Effective marketing is based on customer intelligence.

This will impact positively on people's feelings about your brand and its values. Negative feedback also gives you the perfect opportunity to quickly resolve customers' problems in an ultra-visible fashion.

Or on Facebook or Twitter, better that they do so on your corporate blog than through their own (perhaps hugely popular) blog. Seriously disgruntled customers will gripe online whether you have a blog or not, besides.

Instead of frantically fighting fires across the internet, allowing you to quickly monitor and respond to complaints of all kinds, a corporate blog is a lightning rod for customer feedback.