The term blog (shortened form of web log) was used for the very first time in 1997 by Jorn BARGER. This tool has gained rampant popularity over the past four years and has considerably modified the way to communicate. Indeed, this tool enables multiple users to post easily diaries of their thoughts to a website (displayed in a chronological way); those texts are most of the time enriched with external links and opened to be commented by the readers. According to several sites such as “technorati.com” (a search engine dedicated to blogs), there are more than 30 million blogs world wide and 2.1 billion links into the “blogosphere”. In France, we count 4 million blogs, for an audience of 8 million bloggers (JDN, 2005). This craze has recently pushed 10 companies to set up theirs in France - the pioneers are named “Vous les hommes”, “Le journal de ma peau”, “Inconnue” - whereas they are several hundreds of them in the United States. From a general point of view, companies are nervous about setting up a corporate blog: results can be as highly beneficial as dramatic. A study (Ezra PALMER, 2005) emphasizes that blogs can “burnish brands, generate awareness and open doors to consumers, but also bend Web Traffic, upend organic search results and tarnish a company’s reputation”
That is the reason why companies are highly advised to deeply analyse the characteristics of this new communication channel and to precisely be aware of the involvement it requires. A good mean of avoiding strategic mistakes when implementing an official corporate blog would be to pre-test a semi-official version. This technique allows companies to better affine their communication strategies and to answer to the following questions stressed in “Blogueur d’entreprise” (François NONNENMACHER, 2006): what to expect from it? Which subjects will be developed? Which kind of blog should be adopted? Who will the readers be? What will be the publication rhythm? Which intellectual property to apply?
One of the main difficulties copes with the track and the measurement of the ROI (Yaw SCOTT, 2006): this perilous exercise is often subjective. It is too soon to weigh up the added value of this phenomenon and it seems complicated to establish a direct economic link. When companies provide feedbacks to the bloggers’ comments, could it estimate the impact of this close relationship on the annual results?
To be successful in corporate blogging, a company has to focus on some essential points:
- To be traffic minded in order to improve the blog’s visibility and to be ranked in first position on search engines (Jeremy WRIGHT, 2006): a corporate blog has to be linked with other blogs (which might link it back) and must contain key words. From a technical point of view, the use of “trackbacks” is essential: they inform the “blogger” that a blog refers to his.
- To maintain solid relationships with the readers, while establishing a community spirit based upon ideas and interest. Thus, the corporate blog will gain in credibility and will save time in harmonising the contents.
Moreover, as companies divert the blogs from their original use they have to respect the blogs’ essence; in other words, a fundamental (but not clearly defined) set of informal rules: transparency, authenticity, spontaneousness, opening, reactivity, humility. Nevertheless, this is contradictory to the way companies are used to communicate until now: the tendency was to protect itself rather than both to be opened to customers and to appear more “human”.
In order to better apprehend this radical change, some companies have crafted a “moderation charter”, a “guideline”. Some concrete and interesting examples: Feedster Corporate Blogging Policy, Thomas Nelson Blogging Guidelines, Plaxo Plublic Internet Communication Policy This method should theoretically prevent bloggers from divulging trade secrets, confidential, proprietary or inappropriate information.
Shall we take the concrete example of IBM Blogging policy which contains 11 points. Number 2 “You must make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of IBM” highlights the main problem of employee blogs. According to me, this is clear and understandable from the company’s perspective; but if we take into consideration the bloggers’ minds, there is no doubt that they associate James Snell with IBM, Scoble with Microsoft or Schwartz with Sun…Fredrik Wacka (
www.corporateblogging.info) do believe that this is exactly what those companies want but they should make it clearer. We could go even further in the guidelines logic by creating a board of employees whose role would be to promote blogging within the company while maintaining the company’s interest. One of their tasks would be to validate the bloggers’ comments for instance.
Nevertheless, are there no contradictions between the authenticity and the spontaneity “preached” and the “Blog-Tiquette”, by analogy with the “Netiquette Guidelines”? This emphasizes the complexity for a company to radically modify its way to communicate - according to Hugh MACLEOD, “the trick consists in not trying to sell too openly” (gaping-void.com). But are the culture of the company and its environment favourable to this kind of communication?
Each company has to find the type of blog which corresponds to its communication strategy and which allows it to achieve its objectives. In the article “Corporate weblogs”, Phil WAINEWRIGHT (2002) sets up the following typology of the corporate blogs:
- Internal, in order to facilitate the team projects or the internal events communication for instance.
- External, aiming at exchanging with one or several specific targets (customers, suppliers, stakeholders…)
Internally, blogs can replace intranets (which “cleanses” e-mails boxes) or inform 2x8 / 3x8 teams of the work made by the previous ones. Externally, companies which are quoted on the stock market will use a CEO blog as a financial communication channel because of three characteristics: immediate access, no intermediaries (diminution of the risk of errors) and universal (François NONNENMACHER, 2006).
Moreover, we can argue that corporate blogs are integrated into a long term communication strategy because of their high flexibility (John JANTSCH, 2006) - a corporate blog is only limited by the writer’s imagination.
From a general point of view, companies which own a corporate blog benefit from the following points:
- A competitive advantage or a good way to differentiate itself, as in France very few companies have launched theirs until now.
- The ability to master its own communication channel. Jonathan SCHWARTZ, president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystem argues that traditional communication channels regularly divert its comments from their original sense (David KLINE & Dan BURSTEIN, 2005)
- A good opportunity to reinforce brand equity as web surfers think it is a reliable source of information
- The spread of the brand image: “we project the brand image through many roads and the blog gives us even more dimension” (BACKBONEMEDIA, 2004). Moreover, companies are considered as more modern.
- The relation with readers: corporate blogs make customers more involved in the development of products and they make employees more concerned about the company (Susan HEATHFIELD, 2006).
- A respectful communication: corporate blogs are seen as “non-aggressive” as they do not intrude in the intimacy of the customers (at the contrary of direct marketing for instance).
Nevertheless, the threats are real, especially when a company does not respect the set of informal rules mentioned previously. If we take the example of a company which cancels negative feedbacks without any explanations, readers will certainly discover it, forward the information to someone else (and so on), with the fulgurating effect of the Internet. At the end, the corporate blog will loose its credibility (and a large number of readers); it will then be a very hard task to have their confidence back. Another delicate element consists in the way to write articles and comments (Robert SCOBLE, 2003): bloggers will reject a blog which is too formally written or too much profit oriented.
Technically, spams - originally a very cheap quality US paté- are non-requested mails sent to a very great number of people without their prior agreement (
http://www.dicofr.com/cgi-bin/n.pl/dicofr/definition/20010101004535): they can damage the image of a company (a post linked to an inappropriate website) or over pollute the blog (hundreds of comments).
Generally speaking, we can argue that in corporate blogging, small and medium sized companies can easily share the stage with a minimum investment (Darrell ZAHORSKY, 2006) and precisely understand which role their niche plays inside the market (John CASS, 2005). On the other hand, a large enterprise has a real interest in showing a human face to its customers. Moreover, it has the possibility to leverage its partners’ base, which has a strong impact on the creation and development of communities (Stephen TURCOTTE, 2005).
Whatever is the size of companies, CEOs should corporate blog in order to directly communicate with customers, stakeholders and suppliers; but according to the study “who is really behind bosses’ blog?” (WRITER4BUSINESS, 2005), only 20% of them do corporate blog; worse, 83% admit they do not write by themselves the articles which are published, arguing that they have no time to do it or that they do not feel confident enough in writing articles (they only validate the articles before they are posted). According to Jeremy WRIGHT (2006), blogs of employees represent a very powerful mean to connect people with others inside the company and to build up relations with people outside. Furthermore, companies should encourage them to blog in order to let ideas coming up (especially if the company promotes idea blogs). In addition, a customer who is loyal to an employee blog might transpose its loyalty to the brand. Last but not least, some companies, instead of managing their own corporate blog, have chosen to entrust its development by someone else (person or company) who will endorse the responsibility of the content (
http://tubbydev.typepad.com/entreprise_et_blog/).
To conclude, there is no doubt that the pioneers in corporate blogging will benefit from a first step competitive advantage; it will then be difficult for the competition to fill its delay as the success of a blog is generally linked to the experience. However, the more the companies will use blogs to communicate differently, the more they will divert them from their original use. This emphasizes the real difficulty to clearly predict the future of corporate blogging. Still, based on what is informally said in a large amount of personal blogs (http://www.internetactu.net/?p=5831), we could draw up the following trend: corporate blogs will certainly contain much more sound and videos in a near future. The “podcasting” will merely become an additional way to communicate within a continuum of methods available. But technological evolutions will be less radical than culture changes (David Kline & Dan Burstein, 2005).
Thanks to corporate blogs, we should – if everyone plays the game – witness real “win-win” situations: better products for the customers when companies take into account their comments; bigger market shares for companies due to the customers’ loyalty. On the other hand, companies which do not act properly will experience dramatic consequences. To make it simple, corporate blogs are good for good companies and bad for bad companies…