Not all promoting and marketing techniques yield results in any given situation and likewise blogs aren’t always the best solution. In certain cases, a blog can become a useless investment, or worse, a way to boost the already negative view the audience has on a company.
Before launching a blog, each company needs to ask the following questions:
2.1. Is the blog a necessity or just a whim?
A company’s decision to launch a blog may be based on obvious advantages generated by the freedom of communication and by its being given a human touch. Considering these advantages or failing to do so, we still run into situations where a company chooses to launch a blog because of reasons such as:
- Our competitor X has launched a blog;
- It’s trendy, any teen has one. Why can’t we have one?
- We want to look high-tech / tech savvy.
In theory, none of the reasons above is a real obstacle, given it’s associated with and supported by other factors such as having the necessary resources to create and maintain a blog or a positive or neutral image in the market.
2.2 Do you have the needed resources to launch and maintain a blog?
Unlike classic company website, blogs keep consuming resources.
Blogs imply costs. Be it the technical side – design, development, hosting, be it hiring an experienced blogger to maintain it and publish fresh content, a blog needs financial resources.
Blogs take time. It takes time to create and publish content; it takes time to research, write posts, update them and maintain the blog. And for any company with a sense of business, time always means money.
Blogs need dedicated personnel. While there are quite a few tools to render content publishing automatic, the best results in corporate blogging are harvested by those publishing customized content, created by their own people. Are there people in your team who can maintain the blog? If not, do you have enough resources to bring in someone new?
Blog require information. And information is either created or needs to be searched for, analyzed and filtered. These steps also take time and need to be carried out by people who need to be effective and thorough in research, data filtering and content creation.
2.3 How does the online audience feel about your company?
We are talking about the online world, where the fastest and most relevant reactions are being published. How do we track them?
2.3.1 Reactions in the blogosphere: Technorati
Technorati.com is at the same time a blog search engine and a blog content aggregation service. According to the latest data, Technorati indexes and analyzes the activity of about 110 blogs from around the world.
Through a system reviewing both post tags and inter-blog links, Technorati returns relevant search result in a reverse-chronological order, the most recent ones being displayed first.
2.3.2 Reactions in the blogosphere: Google Blog Search
The world famous Google has a search engine entirely dedicated to blogs. Using the traditional search algorithms it’s already known for, Google Blog Search allows you to filter results based on multiple search parameters as well as on the date when the blog articles and reactions have been published.
Running a search for your company’s name will most likely return relevant results which are usually very personal, as they are reactions from within the blogosphere. If your brand mainly targets domestic customers, the wisest choice is to use the local version of the blog search engine.
And of course, running the search directly on the main Google search engine can return similarly relevant results.
2.3.3 Reactions in the online press from your field
Although it is not always the most relevant source, as it is often affiliated to certain trade groups or biased by advertising constraints, the online press covering your field can be an effective indicator for your company’s image by taking into account what their experts and analysts have to say about you.
2.3.4. Quantifying the risk factor
Based on the results obtained after analyzing all these online reactions, one can quite accurately quantify the risk factor their company is exposed to by publishing a blog, especially if it is a blog that allows comments to be posted.
A negative online image can lead to a virtually unlimited series of negative comments which rarely have to do with the actual content published on the blog. Visitors would have thus found a way to express all their frustration caused by real or imaginary flaws they see in the company’s products and services.
2.4 Interpreting the answers
It hardly takes a genius to determine if the blog is just a whim with a short life span and inexistent success in communicating with customers.
Also, it is obvious that without the necessary resources, a blog cannot be launched or it will be launched while lacking any real possibility of it being maintained in the future.
And who would ever want to help spread an already bad image through exposing themselves to ever present negative comments, especially in their own “online home”?
Other chapters of the Corporate Blogging Guide
Chapter 1: Introduction to Blogging
Chapter 2: Critical Questions Before Launching a Corporate Blog (current)
Chapter 3: Setting up Goals and Blog Positioning
Chapter 4: Types of Corporate Blogs
Chapter 5: Blog Editors & Editorial Policy
Chapter 6: Blogging Tips to Get You Started
Chapter 7: Blog Performance Tracking Tools
Photo credits to Johanna Ljungblom