Blogging as a business and blogging for business possess different success metrics. Blogging as a business - or sites hoping to subsist from advertising - must concentrate on traffic. Eyeballs are still essential to lucrative blogs, perpetuating the metrics used for nearly a century in print journalism. Blogging for business (corporate blogging), however, removes advertising revenue and editorial competition from the equation, shifting the focus to quality over quantity. In terms of blogging for business, a quality viewer is an individual likely to disseminate niche information to a larger, more diverse audience.
Examine the relatively low traffic levels for Coca Cola, Amway Global, and Johnson and Johnson corporate blogs:
The 1000 - 5000 monthly viewers to the sites above do not necessarily reflect a corporate blog's health. For example, Google's blog network focuses on cultivating quality viewers rather than mass quantity. The company ignores their real-world business model of driving pageviews, and instead allows employees to provide personal updates on their life and work at Google. This obviously builds a necessary connection with customers, but also creates a location for people who Blog as a Business to retrieve corporate insight during the research process. The Gmail group - responsible for Google's email service - recently posted about the integration of gadgets which created no community comments. Within days, however, nearly 50 technology blogs referenced the development including highly trafficked sites like Read Write Web and Google Blogoscoped. These two sites alone attract nearly 1.3 million viewers per month (compete.com).
So how can you organize a community to view your corporate blog as an open window to your company's culture? The first step is not policing the content with the same tactics used for press releases and traditional publications. FT ComMetrics corporate blog index recommends the following:
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Examine the relatively low traffic levels for Coca Cola, Amway Global, and Johnson and Johnson corporate blogs:
The 1000 - 5000 monthly viewers to the sites above do not necessarily reflect a corporate blog's health. For example, Google's blog network focuses on cultivating quality viewers rather than mass quantity. The company ignores their real-world business model of driving pageviews, and instead allows employees to provide personal updates on their life and work at Google. This obviously builds a necessary connection with customers, but also creates a location for people who Blog as a Business to retrieve corporate insight during the research process. The Gmail group - responsible for Google's email service - recently posted about the integration of gadgets which created no community comments. Within days, however, nearly 50 technology blogs referenced the development including highly trafficked sites like Read Write Web and Google Blogoscoped. These two sites alone attract nearly 1.3 million viewers per month (compete.com).
So how can you organize a community to view your corporate blog as an open window to your company's culture? The first step is not policing the content with the same tactics used for press releases and traditional publications. FT ComMetrics corporate blog index recommends the following:
- Allow all to visit your site. Do not require registration
- Provide the option to leave comments
- Post new content every 6-8 weeks at minimum
- Do not focus on a single event or occasion
- Include the URL on your business card
- Encourage employees to participate through comments
- Comment on related blogs with wider circulation
