To blog or not to blog?

Does your organisation already have a web-presence with a corporate website? What are the goals for your organisation’s web presence? Is the main goal to get ‘Traffic’ and returning ‘traffic’, visitors and visitor loyalty. So how do you achieve those goals?

Maybe a blog? Integrating a blog into your corporate website or ‘connecting’ it to your corporate website can drive traffic onto it, helping you achieve your corporate web-goals.

Blogs have great potential not only to inform but also to challenge perceptions. They can be used to draw out different points of view, commentaries, personal experiences and even, support for your blog post. The blog as a tool empowers people and helps create change.

A blog allows you to bring information to your public much faster than a traditional website. And typical blog readers will check their favourite blogs several times a week. Not so for corporate websites.

Typically blogs offer an easy-to-update, easy-to-work-with contents management system (CMS). If I write an article and have some pictures and a video it will take me a few minutes to post on my blog while it would take me several hours before I can put them on a website.

Money - It can cost a lot to bring a corporate website online, especially if you want some fancy stuff. You buy the Contents Management System, hosting, a document repository system. You hire graphic designers, usability experts, make use cases, and have an army of highly paid developers working through the code. It will take you several months to bring your site online. And how often is the end result not really what you had in mind? How many compromises have you made along the way?

Ease of publishing - blogs integrate the Content Management and the document repository systems, and offer a wide range of themes or graphical designs. They can structure and restructure your information in many different ways. Blogs make it easy to integrate different functionalities through widgets and other bells and whistles. Adding, changing and repositioning blogs is made easy, using WYSIWYG editors.

Community focused - a blog and a ‘normal’ website have another major difference: blogs offer the ability to build a community, to interact with your readers. Through comments, out-of-the-box widgets, blog catalogs, social bookmarking sites, cross linking and cross posting,you get people to interact with you and each other.

But there is more to it. Blogs can also build a community within your own organisation. It gives the opportunity for your staff members to bring out their stories, and make them feel part of your organisation’s community. And your readers will love the field stories.

A sense of forgiveness and tolerance - blogs live in a different sphere than corporate websites. Anything published on a corporate site typically goes through a public relations department, and takes time for a webmaster to published. Errors are often taken seriously by those who publish and those who read. As blogs have grown out of the personal sphere, blogs have more an air of tolerance, of forgiveness. A text on a corporate site has to be perfect. A picture crystal-clear. Not so on blogs. And even less so on microblogs.

In-house blogs - not all blogs have to be for the general public. You can restrict access to your blogs to in-house use also, running on your intranet. Once again, it will give your staff the ability to bring out their stories, to build the sense of ‘belonging’. And if you are more serious about it all, it allows the sharing of information and experiences.

Are you ready to blog?