PR Communications

Measuring the value of corporate Blogs

I am attempting to understand the value of corporate blogs to companies. I think I can identify two principal ways in which a corporate blog can add value to a company. (1) A learning tool for product development and customer feedback, Macromedia's product development team use blogs in this way, there development staff have a number of blogs and they gain a lot of ideas from the interactions with customers. (2) A marketing and PR tool for building community with your customers and auidence. A corporate blog allows you to combine good content, with lots of keywords resulting in highly ranked pages around a particular subject matter. The nature of blogs, regular content that is posted throughout the week, gives a blogger the chance to get lots of new relevant content in search engines through search engine optimization techniques. You therefore have a tool for creating viral word of mouth campaigns, from customers who read your blog on a regular basis and new visitors from search engines.

My question this posting--if you have a corporate blog does the value you get from your corporate blog fall into either or both of these categories? If not what type of value do you get from your corporate blog?

(Note: I think I define a corporate blog to be both a formal and informal blog that discusses a bloggers industry or company.)

Testing the HR process

I am currently reading a book called "Software Testing in the Real World: Improving the process". It occured to me that you can take the methods used in testing and apply them to the hr recruiting process. If problems occur in tesing at the requirements stage. Bugs and defects pop up because the user's needs were not accurately described. I wonder if the same can happen in the HR recruiting process. My suggestion would be to conduct QA on your job descriptions.

How do you engage visitors to your blog?

I think it's fairly easy to set up a blog, start writing content with the keywords you want to use to attract readers and get high rankings in search engines. Once you have people coming to the blog, how do you engage that traffic and continue the conversation? Email sign up, webinars, comments etc.

I have an email list, but I don't advertise the list on the blog at the moment. I send emails to people to draw them back to the site and now I am asking survey questions (hopefully producing comments).

Two types of Corporate Blog

There appear to be two types of corporate blogs, those that link into a company's existing customer community and those that seek to create one.

Corporate Blogging: Blogger Questions

For all of those corporate bloggers, I have some questions for you about corporate blogging:

1) Why do you blog for your company?

2) What goals did you set for the blog?

3) How do you think your blog fits into your company's communications strategy?

4) Tell me about the publishing mechanics of your blog. How often do you publish? How do you decide what to publish? Any special publishing techniques?

5) Who writes the blog? Who contributes to the blog on a regular basis?

6) Have you achieved your original communications goals?

7) Were there any unexpected communications or learning consequences as a result of publishing your blog?

Macromedia Corporate Blogging

This article on Macromedia's corporate blogging strategy is very interesting, especially the information regarding how their corporate blogs spread information quickly through a community of developers.

Corporate Blog Visitor Survey

Corporate blogs are a new entity on the web in the last year or so. I've been wondering if they actually fulfill a customer's need, and differently than a normal website. I have some ideas why a corporation might develop a blog, but I was wondering what blog readers thought about the whole idea. I'd like to propose this survey. If you have a corporate blog, and would like to post this survey, let me know your readers answers.

1) Why do you read corporate blogs?

2) How does a corporate blog differ from a website/forum/email/other marketing effort in your mind?

3) How should a corporate blog be structured? What content do you expect to see?

Finding an unmet need

If you consider what marketing really can be to a company, I think marketing at its best can be finding an unmet need and satisfying they need. Even before your company has a product. Many times marketers already have a product, and their role is more of having to sell that product to customers. Through market research or a situation analysis a marketing person can discover the unmet needs of their customers.

A recent example was a company that makes funeral urns that can be x-rayed. Customers needed to take their departed through the x-ray machines at airports (your not going to send your parent in the baggage hold), a company has developed an urn that you can take through x-ray machines, the first of its kind. Apparently the product is a real hit and they are selling 300 a week.

Banner Ads

Here is a great article about banner ad development.

Why PR Professionals make good Internet Marketing people

This post is from my article "PR - The next Internet Revolution", back in September.

Some characteristics of PR, that led me to think that PR will play an important future role on the net.

* PR people have to defend their brand constantly in the media marketplace on a daily basis with journalists, this previous experience to the rigors of the communications market prepare PR people more than anyone else to our evolving media society.
* PR people have to convince journalists and other stakeholders that their story is important to the journalist's and stakeholders market, selling their story on value to the journalists audience. The net is the same, web site marketers have to provide value or their audience and customers move onto the next site.
* The media world has changed, news is delivered 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and the Internet is the reason for that change. Traditional PR powered by Internet tools will be one of few ways to manage the communications pressures to publish quickly and well in the 21st century.