JOURNAL - Corporate blogging strategies

LEE, S., HWANG, T., & LEE, H. (2006) Coporate blogging strategies of the Fortune 500 companies. Management Decision 44 (3) p316-334.

So in the last post I summarised my own feelings about blogging and what I think I can use it for but perhaps more interestingly, this journal investigates how companies are using blogs to capture and engage with consumers and employees.

A corporate blog might be defined as a web site where an organisation publishes and manages content to attain its goals.

"A "blog" - short for "web log" - is a web page that serves as a publicly accessible personal journal for an individual (Blood, 2002). Because the blog can be used to convey various types of information, such as personal, public, commercial, and political, it has become an effective communication tool over the internet."

There are a lack of rules that govern the blogsphere and it has been termed as today's 'Wild West' (Jones, 2005).

If an organisation adopts employee blogs then this automatically raises the issue of control - but then if control is present on a blog is this really the true voice of the employees and does this acutally add anything to the business? In the worst case scenario however, some employees have been fired over blogs they have written eg: a Delta Air Lines flight attendant lost her job because she posted photos of herself in her uniform on her blog which the airline felt were 'inappropriate and an unauthorised use of Delta branding'.

Types of corporate blogs
The authors of this article suggest 5 types of different corporate blogs:

(1) Employee blog - a personal blog that is maintained by a single rank-and-file employee. Can be hosted on commercial sites or (as is the case increasingly now) can be hosted on company-owned domains as more companies are officially sponsoring employee blogging.

(2) Group blog - written be several people, this type of blog is also known as a collaborative blog. Usually focus on a specific topic and contributors are experts on the topic.

(3) Executive blog - 'when top executives appear in the blogsphere, thier blogs generate instant traffic and can be an effective tool to establish a direct connection with stakeholders'. In the current business environment it is believed that top-level executives should be more transparent and disclose more information than ever before.

(4) Promotional blog - purpose is to generate buzz about products and events. This type can be controversial largely due to the lack of an authentic human voice. One of the first attempts of this type of blogs was for Dr Pepper/Seven Up's Raging Cow blog, which was supposedly written by its cow mascot. The company hired several young bloggers and aksed them to promote its new milk beverage "Raging Cow" via thier personal blogs. This strategy was severly criticised as being deceptive and one blogger even proposed a product boycott (Gallagher, 2003).

(5) Newsletter blog - some organisations have launched a newsletter type blog that officially represents their positions. They cover a variety of news such as company news and product information.