About ten days ago I wrote a post about corporate blogging. My premise was that the corporate blog was a bit of a different beast than the individual blog. The corporate blog requires some thought and planning. As a follow-up, I'd like to share this post with you. The premise of this post is that corporate blogging is on the decline. If that is so, it's too bad and likely the result of a lack of planning on the part of the corporations who have stopped blogging. I continue to maintain corporate bloging in important for corporations to connect with their customers.
You are right on Brad. Unfortunately, businesses are often told by someone they consider an Internet marketing authority that they need to blog. At the same time, a set of expectations are set about how blogging will drive new business through the Internet, which, if implemented correctly, within an integrated Internet marketing strategy, can be true for many businesses. This is one of the reasons blogging is so prolific.
There are a lot of factors that have to come when developing a blogging strategy including content creation, leveraging social media channels for content discovery, distribution and reach, search, the market niche, competition, audience media consumption preferences, etc. All these must be planned just like a marketing campaign in order for blogging to provide ROI.
Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for chiming in Rick. I agree with you and believe that creating a corporate blog is not for every business. Lots of factors must be considered first. We ask a lot of questions before suggesting that a company start a blog, a Facebook Page, a Twitter Page, etc. etc. It is important to understand the company, its culture, clientele, target audience and goals before making all these decisions.
I also appreciate you bringing up the issue of ROI. I have much to say about ROI but for these purposes I’d just mention that it makes sense when a company is planning a corporate blog (or any social media marketing, for that matter) they should think ahead about ROI and determine what they are going to consider in the “calculation.” How do they calculate the ROI of their other marketing efforts? Does an increase in traffic to their website count? Does an increase to subscriptions to the blog count? How about spikes in Facebook “Likes” that can be correlated to a blog post? Do these things count or are they only going to look at whether their product or service is being sold as a result of the blog?
Just to spark some conversation, I’ll share with you a conversation I had with someone a few weeks ago. This person made a very persuasive argument that social media has no ROI and everyone ought to stop trying to calculate it. Her point was that one does not “invest” in social media. Investments show up on a company’s Balance Sheet. Social Media is a cost of doing business. It is an “Expense” that appears on the company’s P&L Statement like their other marketing expenses. It was an interesting conversation that provided much food for thought. I’d be curious to hear your take on this either here or send me an email!
Thanks again for taking the time to add your comment to this post!