Ø Article: Des Jardins Jory (November 2005), “When blogs go bad”, www.inc.com,
Jory Des Jardins reveals in this article that corporate blogs obey to a proper set of rules and regulations. When someone breaks them, the corporate blog can be subject to dramatic consequences. One example would be to cancel negative feedbacks without any explanations. Readers will certainly discover it and tell it to others bloggers, who will forward the information to someone else and so on. At the end, the corporate blog will loose its credibility and a high number of readers.
As previously mentioned, companies are (almost) free to write what they unless they respect some informal rules of blogging: one of the most important is “authenticity”. I would add that if a corporate blog looks too much commercially oriented, consumers will deny reading the posts.
Ø Book: Nonnenmacher François (2006), “Blogueur d’entreprise”, Groupe Eyrolles, ISBN 2708133292, p.163-165
The author warns companies on the possible nuisances of a corporate blog. The first undesirable aspect deals with spams: they can damages the image of a company (a post linked with pornographic websites for instance) or over pollute the blog (hundreds of comments and TrackBacks). The second delicate point is the management of the negative comments: unless corporate blogs might respect some rules to be efficient, readers can post whatever they want. Last but not least, if a corporate blog does not have serious and solid information to provide nobody will read it.
In my opinion, good corporate blogs should be strongly armed against the spams or it will constantly suffer from those intrusions. Secondly, I consider negative feedbacks as an excellent opportunity for the companies to show their reactivity and to keep their customers loyal. The last point evoked in this article is similar to what was written in introduction: companies do not have to set up a corporatble blog merely because it is fashionable.
Ø Book: Nonnenmacher François (2006), “Blogueur d’entreprise”, Groupe Eyrolles, ISBN 2708133292, p.203-207
This part of the book informs the readers on the limits of a corporate blog. Even if bloggers constantly push away the limits of a business blog, they should not try to replace every communication support by blogs. Indeed, if we compare them to content management tools, they are not adapted because of their chronological logic and owing to the unique format of a post. In addition, blogs were dedicated to the public: models of commercial licenses are then not adapted to companies (proportional to the number of authors rather than to a server).
Ø Book: Nonnenmacher François (2006), “Blogueur d’entreprise”, Groupe Eyrolles, ISBN 2708133292, p.213-228
The author weighs up the pros and cons of the tools which can be integrated to a corporate blog.
· If a domain name is linked to a software blogging platform, the company could loose all the links which refer to its posts when it decides to use another tool.
· If the enterprise does not use a tool which allows to save and to extract documents, it runs the risk to loose all the content.
· Too many useless plugins could slow down the corporate blog.
· Some blogging softwares are not able to manage more than one blog; it is then compulsory to set up each blog individually if the company aims to have several blogs on one server.
· Some tools require a high degree of HTML expertise to modify a template.
· Corporate blogs which are hosted only have access to the statistic system of the blogging platform; then cannot customize it according to heir needs.
The tools which allow to blog are numerous today and some of them have subtle differences. The hardest task for a company remains to pick up the one which matches with its needs. This choice is crucial when we think about the penalizing consequences of moving from one tool to another.