Company Blogs: Various Uses
6 October 2008
Read by 1844 persons
What are the different types of company blogs?
There are two main categories of blogs: personal blogs and company blogs. The former are either personal diaries, sometimes called "girl blogs," or blogs on a topic dear to the author: photography, comics, cooking, politics, technology, internet, etc.
On the other hand, there are company blogs: fewer in number, less known but with many advantages. They can be classified into several categories according to their content, their author and whether they are internal or public.
CEO Blogs
From the head of an SME to the CEO of a large group, including serial entrepreneurs, CEO blogs allow for a human and personal communication with clients, partners, shareholders, and employees. Examples include Michel-Edouard Leclerc, Pierre Bigler (former CEO of Alstom), Thomas Lot (CEO of Chronopost International - Former Vice President of Amazon), Bill Marriott, and Randy Tinseth (VP marketing of Boeing). On a CEO blog, it's not the company speaking through its communication department, it's a person (man or woman). In this case, the company's number one. They have both the credibility and the legitimacy to speak on the news of their sector, industry, or market because they are one of the main players. Examples of topics discussed: Purchasing power, GMOs, child obesity, subprime crisis, golden parachute, etc.
Employee Blogs
There are blogs initiated by one or more employees (a cashier's blog), sometimes anonymously and sometimes as part of a protest movement (the CFTC union blog at HP or the customer service employees of SFR). And there are companies that take the initiative to launch their own blog platform where each employee, who requests it, can have a dedicated blog, offered and hosted by their company. This is particularly the case for Microsoft employees.
HR Blogs
Recruiting, young graduates in particular, is a strategic priority in some sectors. However, candidates, who are mainly looking for explanations about the content of different positions and the differences between companies, only have the HR section of websites as a source of information, where each company often claims the same values as its competitors. Candidates, not very receptive to the institutional communication of HR departments, mainly want to discuss and exchange with employees to understand their daily work. What was possible punctually and on a small scale with recruitment fairs and forums becomes possible permanently and on a web scale thanks to blogs. In terms of HR blogs, the blog of the French national police is among the pioneers: there are articles written by real police officers in office and video testimonials to inform candidates about recruitment, competitions, training, different functions, and the daily job of a police officer. Brands like Cadbury Schweppes in the UK or Sephora also use blogs as an HR communication tool.
Brand Blogs
Internet users who are fans of a brand sometimes initiate the launch of a blog on a product (the iPhone blog on Apple's phone) or a service (the "Learn Facebook" blog by Alban Martin). If your brand is not lucky enough to have an active community of fans blogging about your products, you can always do it yourselves, like Knacki Ball or Playstation. The brand blog is a great opportunity to animate and grow a community of ambassadors: brand fans.
Expertise Blogs
A blog is often the showcase of a company's or professional's expertise in their field. Thus, we find blogs in liberal professions such as lawyers' blogs (Maitre Eolas, Philippe Bilger, Cedric Manara, and the avocats.fr blogs), accountants' blogs (Zefyr), and many consultant blogs in various fields. Companies are not left behind. Several communication and marketing agencies maintain a blog to demonstrate their expertise and offer free and public content to their readers, whether they are partners, clients, prospects, students, suppliers, or even competitors! Blogging one's expertise has more advantages (gaining commercial contracts, recruitment, notoriety, image) than disadvantages (content accessible to the competition).
Internal Blogs
There are several uses of internal blogs: monitoring and project management are the two main ones.
-> Monitoring Blog
Orange's High-Speed Mobile division allowed several dozen employees to receive training on blogs (by the You to You agency) to become bloggers themselves on high-speed mobile. For several months, Orange employees have been writing, reading, commenting, and sharing information on the news of their profession: Wi-Fi, mobile offers, competitors, events, terminals, technological innovations... in other words, an online version of professional discussions that usually take place around the coffee machine. Then, an editor selects the best articles and publishes them on one of Orange's three websites on Wi-Fi, Blackberry, and the Business Everywhere offer to share them with internet users.
Other companies like Alcatel-Lucent share an entire internal blog dedicated to the news of their competitors.
-> Project Blogs
The principle is to blog everything that happens during the life of a project. The advantages are to reduce the workload of project actors' emails, to have access at any time to the project history with everyone's contributions, and to keep a trace of the different exchanges in one place in an exhaustive and well-organized way (one topic = one article, answers = comments).
And other company blogs
Other applications can be imagined for company blogs, such as e-commerce blogs (Spartoo), sponsored blogs (the Giiks blog by Bouygues Telecom, Deedee's podcasts sponsored by Garnier, VousLesHommes by Celio), trade show blogs (entrepreneurs' trade show), book blogs, participatory marketing blogs (La Fraise), and many others...
Do you agree with this categorization? Do you have other examples? Do you see other types of uses of blogs in companies?
As a reminder, you can read this article which lists the advantages of a company blog compared to a website and aims to show that these two tools are complementary.
Posted on October 6, 2008
marketing20.fr
There are two main categories of blogs: personal blogs and company blogs. The former are either personal diaries, sometimes called "girl blogs," or blogs on a topic dear to the author: photography, comics, cooking, politics, technology, internet, etc.
On the other hand, there are company blogs: fewer in number, less known but with many advantages. They can be classified into several categories according to their content, their author and whether they are internal or public.
CEO Blogs
From the head of an SME to the CEO of a large group, including serial entrepreneurs, CEO blogs allow for a human and personal communication with clients, partners, shareholders, and employees. Examples include Michel-Edouard Leclerc, Pierre Bigler (former CEO of Alstom), Thomas Lot (CEO of Chronopost International - Former Vice President of Amazon), Bill Marriott, and Randy Tinseth (VP marketing of Boeing). On a CEO blog, it's not the company speaking through its communication department, it's a person (man or woman). In this case, the company's number one. They have both the credibility and the legitimacy to speak on the news of their sector, industry, or market because they are one of the main players. Examples of topics discussed: Purchasing power, GMOs, child obesity, subprime crisis, golden parachute, etc.
Employee Blogs
There are blogs initiated by one or more employees (a cashier's blog), sometimes anonymously and sometimes as part of a protest movement (the CFTC union blog at HP or the customer service employees of SFR). And there are companies that take the initiative to launch their own blog platform where each employee, who requests it, can have a dedicated blog, offered and hosted by their company. This is particularly the case for Microsoft employees.
HR Blogs
Recruiting, young graduates in particular, is a strategic priority in some sectors. However, candidates, who are mainly looking for explanations about the content of different positions and the differences between companies, only have the HR section of websites as a source of information, where each company often claims the same values as its competitors. Candidates, not very receptive to the institutional communication of HR departments, mainly want to discuss and exchange with employees to understand their daily work. What was possible punctually and on a small scale with recruitment fairs and forums becomes possible permanently and on a web scale thanks to blogs. In terms of HR blogs, the blog of the French national police is among the pioneers: there are articles written by real police officers in office and video testimonials to inform candidates about recruitment, competitions, training, different functions, and the daily job of a police officer. Brands like Cadbury Schweppes in the UK or Sephora also use blogs as an HR communication tool.
Brand Blogs
Internet users who are fans of a brand sometimes initiate the launch of a blog on a product (the iPhone blog on Apple's phone) or a service (the "Learn Facebook" blog by Alban Martin). If your brand is not lucky enough to have an active community of fans blogging about your products, you can always do it yourselves, like Knacki Ball or Playstation. The brand blog is a great opportunity to animate and grow a community of ambassadors: brand fans.
Expertise Blogs
A blog is often the showcase of a company's or professional's expertise in their field. Thus, we find blogs in liberal professions such as lawyers' blogs (Maitre Eolas, Philippe Bilger, Cedric Manara, and the avocats.fr blogs), accountants' blogs (Zefyr), and many consultant blogs in various fields. Companies are not left behind. Several communication and marketing agencies maintain a blog to demonstrate their expertise and offer free and public content to their readers, whether they are partners, clients, prospects, students, suppliers, or even competitors! Blogging one's expertise has more advantages (gaining commercial contracts, recruitment, notoriety, image) than disadvantages (content accessible to the competition).
Internal Blogs
There are several uses of internal blogs: monitoring and project management are the two main ones.
-> Monitoring Blog
Orange's High-Speed Mobile division allowed several dozen employees to receive training on blogs (by the You to You agency) to become bloggers themselves on high-speed mobile. For several months, Orange employees have been writing, reading, commenting, and sharing information on the news of their profession: Wi-Fi, mobile offers, competitors, events, terminals, technological innovations... in other words, an online version of professional discussions that usually take place around the coffee machine. Then, an editor selects the best articles and publishes them on one of Orange's three websites on Wi-Fi, Blackberry, and the Business Everywhere offer to share them with internet users.
Other companies like Alcatel-Lucent share an entire internal blog dedicated to the news of their competitors.
-> Project Blogs
The principle is to blog everything that happens during the life of a project. The advantages are to reduce the workload of project actors' emails, to have access at any time to the project history with everyone's contributions, and to keep a trace of the different exchanges in one place in an exhaustive and well-organized way (one topic = one article, answers = comments).
And other company blogs
Other applications can be imagined for company blogs, such as e-commerce blogs (Spartoo), sponsored blogs (the Giiks blog by Bouygues Telecom, Deedee's podcasts sponsored by Garnier, VousLesHommes by Celio), trade show blogs (entrepreneurs' trade show), book blogs, participatory marketing blogs (La Fraise), and many others...
Do you agree with this categorization? Do you have other examples? Do you see other types of uses of blogs in companies?
As a reminder, you can read this article which lists the advantages of a company blog compared to a website and aims to show that these two tools are complementary.
Posted on October 6, 2008
marketing20.fr
