The corporate blog

• You’ll become (more) visible! In this industry, in your niche, on the entire web! Search engines love user generated content – i.e., content related to themes and key words that have the chance of getting a high ranking on Google (as well as other search engines) by using a medium that search engines prefer. If you’re aware that most users find information about a brand or company through search engines, it is clear what good optimization brings. Additionally, classic news desks are disappearing. There are less and less journalists, and the demand for providing more lively and life-like stories is on the increase. There’s an overall lack of journalists – they don’t have enough time, they’re not paid enough, and there are those who “know better” – hence research articles usually begin with a Google search. And so? How are you going to look like out there? A corporate blog can boost you and position you up high. In combination with other social media sites and networks, perhaps even up on the top!

• Marketing and PR messages don’t communicate our mission nor the characteristics of certain activities (actions, campaigns, brands) clearly enough. You can’t say much in a 25 second TV commercial or fit everything in three sentences inside an advertisement. You could do it in a PR text, but who really reads those today anyway? Who publishes this? The blog is your medium, a medium that’s your very own, allowing you have all the necessary time and space to communicate all important aspects to your audience. Before, the chance for such “technicalities” were press conferences and face to face meetings with representatives of the media. Remember how (difficult) easy it was to organize a good and successful press conference, i.e. – how much time you have to invest in order to adequately dedicate yourself to an editor or journalist working in classic media? The blog is your media center!
• While we’re still on the subject of media centers – the blog is your MULTI media center! Unlike any other medium, the blog is grateful when it comes to publishing different type of content formats: ranging from audio to video clips, texts of course, tweets, or serious analytical articles. This includes anything from photos to graphs, PDF documents and presentations… As many different content formats you use, you won’t overdo it – the blog itself will appear more dynamic and more juicy! Press conference?! Why wouldn’t it be online? On your blog… live? The blog isn’t a genre, wisely noted by my colleague Nataša Ristić, it’s a platform!

What you must know about corporate blogging but only few will tell you about – inside_out!

Everything I mentioned above are reasons for blogging! These are just some results of blogging. If you want to (or already have) begun corporate blogging (just because) some of these reasons, then you had the wrong motive. Carefully read the following:

• The blog is an activity. It’s alive, it’s demanding, and a very human medium. It requires commitment from employees. It requires a connection between organizational units and the synchronization of business processes. It requires unity – on the inside. It requires agreement. A free flow of information. Collaboration. It requires the advancement of organizational culture and the exchange of ideas. It requires a team. In order to run a blog, you either have to be ready or an exhibitionist – in such a way as to go after yourself and clean up constantly throughout the process of blogging. That’s why a blog can be used as an ideal team building exercise for your team! Most importantly though, it can serve as a test (in case you already don’t know ) for determining whether you’re a modern and proactive company or a capitalist dinosaur trapped inside a time machine.
• Blogging is for good companies, or the ones that wish to improve. The make-up exam. The last test period for a conditional exam leading to the next level in conducting your business. For example, you can’t blog if your products are bad and your services unworthy of your users. If your company doesn’t know where it’s at and what it wants to be. If you’re not ready for criticism and dialogue. Answering (because that’s responsibility). If you’re not ready for a fast reaction. Blogging also isn’t for you if you’re not thinking about the well-being of the society in which you conduct your business. If profit is our goal, and not the end result; if you’re assessing consequences and not the causes; if you’re not ready for changes.
• Blogging is a method of the strategic inside-out concept! The process begins inside. Just like any other healthy organ development. When the gartner hype cycle passes, the corporate blog as a type of 21 century website will be used only by the best, and simultaneously the only ones surviving on the market.

Users want to talk to you. To ask you questions. YOU. Yeah you. Directly. They want to critique you, but compliment you as well. There doesn’t exist a more complete conversational place on the internet that the blog! A website doesn’t give you the possibility for interaction. Facebook and Twitter are an extension of some conversation or a beginning that needs to have its continuation. In order to have a conversation, it’s not enough to have to post tweets limited to 140 characters or status messages or comments. The blog is the knot. A hub! A loop. A center. Everything else is just an extension.

When we talk about social media and networks, I plead you to not board the fad/trend bandwagon. The social web isn’t just a trend or a fashion. It is the new constant of all social, as well as business relationships. We won’t applaud to your company’s new blog or Twitter account. We will applaud to the process of change for the better that acted as a prequel to this form of socialization.