Corporate Blogging: New Challenges for Branding

A brand is about how a consumer's perceives and experiences a company. Brand recognition comes from innovative products and services, from advertising and public relations, and from careful use of a company's trademarks. Branding is all about the associations created in the mind of a consumer and blogging offers a unique way of creating a real personality to go with a brand. Blogging is becoming an increasingly important way of reaching consumers who may be tuning out traditional forms of advertising.

Even corporations are getting into the blogging world. A corporation may establish its own blog or can generate a presence on the blogosphere by contributing comments on the blogs of others. Smaller businesses use both practices to increase their reach on the web and establish their reputation for expertise in a particular area. The goal's the same for larger corporations, though a larger corporation may have more resources to fully exploit blogging and to measure its outcomes.

A Marriage of Public Relations and Marketing

Blogging creates an intimacy between public relations and marketing that never existed before. The blogosphere allows a company to monitor audience reaction to its press releases and products or services. Using websites like www.technorati.com and www.icerocket.com, a company can search for blog sites that refer to it, its products or services, and of course, its employees.

How Do You Measure the Success of a Corporate Blog?

Though a large number of postings can be a sign of a healthy blog, it's not the only sign. How do you measure overall audience perception and other outcomes of blogging? For example, how can you tell if the effort you've spent to blog (or the money you spent hiring others to blog for you) led to actual sales?

It isn't enough to count numbers of postings or impressions without determining whether the posting was positive and conveyed the messages that the company's trying to incorporate in its branding strategy. Keyword searching of an engine like Technorati might let you determine how many postings included certain terms you've identified as key to your brand messages. It's still difficult to connect this type of success to sales, but certain statistical tools (e.g., such as multivariate regression analysis) can be used to correlate blogging activities.

The Perils of Blogging

We're all so opinionated and blogging gives us the perfect opportunity to air our thoughts. A risk of corporate blogging is that there may be plenty of bloggers who want to rail against your company, rightly or wrongly.

Blogs also can include a great deal of misinformation in the back and forth of commenting on a discussion topic. For health care blogs, misinformation about drugs and advances in technology indirectly can cause harm. Blogs with a wide enough audience (e.g., a community of experts and non-experts) generally can self-correct. Additionally, ranking systems to rate comments based on community standing and/or expertise also can be used to rate credibility.

For corporations that operate in a highly regulated environment, like pharmaceutical companies, the need to comply with FDA requirements creates particular challenges. The very spontaneity of blogging may be antithetical to these businesses, given the type of care required to generate and review content for consumers.

Examples of Corporate Blog Sites

Despite these perils, many large companies are developing a blogging presence. Examples include Nike, Google, McDonald's, Wells Fargo Bank, Oracle, and Sun. As you'll notice, not all of these companies are technology companies. Corporate blogs may be internal, open only to employees, or external, open to outsiders.

Internal corporate blogs can be a good way to share knowledge about the company's overall branding strategy. Consumers often experience a company through interactions with its employees, so training and reinforcing brand messages are important, particularly as many new hires come on board. Internal blogs also provide a forum for management to address company downturns and fear of layoffs with candor. Whether internal blogs really have that openness that marks external blogs is questionable.

External blogs can relate to products and services the company provides, discuss new career opportunities, or can be a forum for discussing social programs supported by a company (e.g., take McDonald's "Open for Discussion" blog). Some corporate blogs may choose to invite innovative ideas about a company's services. However, a company needs to tread carefully so as not be accused of poaching the intellectual property rights of others. As a branding tool, a company that appears to be honest and straightforward in its dealings has a definite advantage.

Advantages of Corporate Blogging

Positive personal interactions can become a key feature of corporate branding through the enormous reach of the internet. Additionally, monitoring blogs can be used to assess customer experiences and desires. Even negative blogs can provide useful information that leads to improved products and services. Further, a company's honest response to a negative comment can create a positive message for that company.

The Cons

Like most web marketing tools, there's a lot of hype and unrealistic expectations. A blog needs to be tailored to reach your market and perhaps your market is just not the sort to be influenced by a blog site. A lot of time is generally required to make significant impressions, but even then, there's no guarantee that impressions will lead to sales. The mere thought of a company blog is likely to make a corporate attorney shiver. In the unfiltered, spontaneous atmosphere of blogging, there's the danger of liability, claims of libel, and arguments about intellectual property. Under certain circumstances, a company might be held liable for statements of an employee. Appropriate disclaimers can and should be used to mitigate these risks.

Blogging also is associated with many of the same issues that plague e-mails. Commenting can get heated. Postings that are not well thought out can get fired off. A company using a blog to brand creates a virtual alter ego. To maintain the spontaneity of a blog while presenting an appropriate corporate image can be a challenging task. Additionally, internet users are sensitive to hype and can react badly to a blog that's used mainly for advertising and self-promotion. To some degree, all blogs are self-promoting, but the good ones also educate, inform, and create platforms for meaningful discussion. A blog that doesn't have much content to sustain it will tend to fizzle.

Corporate Policies

Not everyone is good at blogging. That's not a bad thing, it just means that training may be needed. Bloggers should be educated to avoid using a blog purely as an advertising tool. In addition to being trained on what makes good blog content and what doesn't, employees involved in blogging should be educated about intellectual property rights, issues of insider trading, and consequences of libel.

If pursuing a blog, a company has to appreciate the resources necessary to post content at least three times a week. Further, the content should reflect and reinforce company values. Which goes back to training: a corporate blogger should understand what a company's key branding messages are.

The take home: Blogging can be a powerful tool to reinforce key company messages, if it's not done with a heavy hand. Blogging as part of a corporate communications strategy can take real skill: it takes writers who can combine marketing skills, technical expertise, and the art of conversation.