21 June 2006

Rise of company blogs

About five years back, I wrote an article titled Why do you need a web presence? in one of my sites, whereby I pointed out the advantages of having a web presence.

It might seem outdated but I find that what I wrote then is still valid today. Even though most businesses have realized the importance of having a web presence, several Malaysian small and medium sized companies still don’t have a web site.

Anyway, in the west the latest trend is to have an official company blog. So far, I haven't come across any Malaysian company with an official blog. However, there are a lot of blogs written by pissed-off employees bad mouthing their place of work.

Recently I came across two interesting online articles by Karen E. Klein in the Businessweek site. In the first article titled Does Your Small Business Need a Blog?, she looks at the pro and cons of having a company blog.
A business blogger could also review industry-specific books, conferences, and organizations and point out relevant articles and Web sites - a service that engenders gratitude and loyalty.

In the second part, she gives some tips on how to get started. I also learnt a new term: splogs, which refers to spam blogs. Read the article here.
A blog can be a great part of your marketing effort, but it should be planned appropriately with strategy in place

I hope more companies start their own blogs which might translate into potential job prospects for all the just-for-fun bloggers.

BTW, read about the Websites-as-Graphs Java applet-based visualizer in an article by Jeff Ooi. Here is my own Social Network Analysis (SNA) site graph.
ahoklah

Tags:

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Er it's not a social network analysis, it just maps the tags within the page, img, href, div, br etc and draws them out.

If you want to see a real cool visual map try http://www.kartoo.com/

Dilip Mutum said...

Shaolintiger: Thanks for the info. I guess you are right and it is not a true social network graph as mentioned by Jeff. Only the blue dots show the links.

Anonymous said...

All because of the ProBlogger's influence lor... :)

AK said...

adam

interesting post, here one blogger was fired by company for writing blog about them

here not too much blogs by companies although increasing, most not interactive,

what is your opinion on this, should company blogs be interactive with comments or read only like most of them are

Blueheeler - the hound who sniffs out fishy news said...

Hopefully a 'company's blog' is not just another avenue for them to sell more products/services.

Dilip Mutum said...

Alan: I believe that an interactive one which allows comments would be more attractive. However, software to screen for spam and to approve commentss should be in place to prevent unwanted, abusive or spam comments.
Blueheeler: I guess these blogs would be more popular if they feature content other than just new product or service information. But of course, they have to first decide the objective of putting up the blog in the first place.

LinkWithin

Blog Widget by LinkWithin