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Corporate marketing and PR types pay attention to the business section in USA Today.

How else do you explain the questions coming our way on whether corporate blogging is worth the effort that started when USA Today published “More companies quit blogging, go with Facebook instead”?

More companies quit blogging, go with Facebook instead

First off, this story has nothing to do with blogging and everything to do with Facebook. It was eyeball bait, capitalizing on the intense interest in Facebook prior to its IPO.

A company moving from blogging to Facebook makes as much sense as replacing the Friday jelly donuts with recipe handouts.

Still, it’s a useful exercise to periodically dust off the “why” behind any marketing activity, so here goes

At its best, corporate blogging delivers four distinct benefits.

It offers a platform to show thought leadership and share views on industry issues. More than one-way communications, these views can trigger dialogue across a company’s ecosystem. The end result is people perceiving the company as smart, engaged and plugged into the community.

Two, on the intangible side, corporate blogging puts a “face” on a company. The platform enables companies to address lightweight topics – sometimes with a touch of levity – and communicate with conversational language. And by sharing information about the person or people contributing to the blog, the outside world gets reminded there are real human beings at the other end of the transaction. Just writing in the first person can make a difference.

The third benefit lies in establishing a another digital door to the company website. By developing a keyword taxonomy that complements the SEO (search engine optimization) strategy of the main site, you can bring incremental yet relevant traffic to the site.

In a sense, corporate blogging was content marketing before the term came into vogue.

Finally, the proper cultivation of a corporate blog eventually produces credible owned media. You always have a pulpit to put forth your position in a timely manner without depending on third-party media.

I always think of Google’s decision to change its approach in China as a milestone for the corporate blog.

Google didn’t send out a news release.

They didn’t hold a press conference.

It was announced on the Google corporate blog.

Those four macro benefits constitute our justification. We welcome hearing others.


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