Is Blogging for Your Company?By Heather C. Conover Blog (noun) an online diary; a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a Web page One can hardly open a newspaper or magazine these days without reading about blogs. A May 2, 2005 BusinessWeek cover story read, “Blogs will change your business. Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up … or catch you later.” According to the BusinessWeek article there are currently approximately 9 million blogs and another 40,000 are added each day. With only 27% of Internet users having visited a blog, chances are a lot of businesspeople haven’t yet visited one. With BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, and myriad other business and industry trade publications reporting on this new tool and its uses in the corporate world, both large and small companies are starting to use blogs to communicate with and get feedback from their customers, to find out what is being said about them by bloggers, and more. Many of the media stories on blogs point to Stonyfield Farms as an example of an early corporate adopter of blogs (http://www.stonyfieldfarms.com/weblog/). With five blogs, Strong Women Daily News, Creating Healthy Kids, The Bovine Bugle, The Daily Scoop, and Baby Babble, Stonyfield Farms uses its blogs as a means of building loyalty to its brands. According to the description at the Stonyfield Farms Daily Blog, “It’s a chance for you to look inside Stonyfield and get to know us, and us to know you.” While Stonyfield and other bloggers point to the opportunities blogs afford them to build their brands; enhance their reputations; connect with customers, employees, and employees’ families; break down barriers; get honest feedback; and show a more personal side, they are quick to point out perils, such as using blogs as a marketing or sales tool. They also stress that a company should be clear about how blogs will support their company goals, develop a code of ethics and metrics for measuring their impact, and be ready to have an open and honest dialog with its publics. Whether about you or by you, blogs are in your corporate future. Start planning for them proactively … before your competition beats you to the blog. Summer 2005 -Volume 15, Number 3
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