Corporate blogging and guidelines
A corporate blog is an avenue for communication and marketing helping the organisation reach its goals. It helps to raise the profile of the organisation.
There are internal and external corporate blogs. Internal blogs tend to be used to provide information or for project management to improve internal communication. External blogs communicate information about products, services, and events as a way to establish closer contacts with customers and to get feedback from customers.
Given the number of bloggers and the variety of topics blogged about, it is worthwhile looking at whether your company and it’s products and services, or your industry, are the focus of blogs.
You can do this using free blog search engines, such as Technorati, Google Blog Search, and Blogpulse (a service provided by Neilsen BuzzMetrics). You can see what your competitors, customers, employees are saying, helping you stay in touch and respond very quickly and very easily with what’s happening.
Corporate blogs contain a mix of information ranging from opinion, information about products or services, and perhaps commenting and responding on popular or unpopular aspects of the company or its products.
Having a set of blogging guidelines is recommended. Yahoo have posted guidelines as well as BBC staff. In 2005, IBM guidelines about blogging were published. This is the less formal version which had some useful reader comments about providing personal information and letting the world know you’re on holidays.
Dell outlines some ‘rules for engagement’ . I also like what Jeremy Pepper says in his “About Blog” and “Comments Policy” clearly outlining to his readers about his opinions and changes to posts, as well as expectations of reader’s comments.
It is expected that bloggers follow a code of ethics which include telling the truth, being accurate, noting mistakes and showing where changes have been made to posts, and not deleting posts. Comments should be addressed respectively, and any conflicts of interests need to be acknowledged.
Blogging guidelines provide you with information about legal issues, that is, the things you don’t or shouldn’t be saying about financial information, trade secrets. They’ll also talk about avoiding issues with copyright, libel and privacy.
Some authors allow you to post content from their papers or sites as long as you acknowledge the authors under the Creative Commons agreement .
So at least one of your posts for the assignment will be on blogging guidelines - appropriate content, legal issues, ethics.
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[...] Communicate through technology, ‘Corporate blogging and guidelines‘ (21/03/2007). Retrieved on 22/03/2007 [...]
[...] Communicate through technology, ‘Corporate blogging and guidelines‘ (21/03/2007). Retrieved on 22/03/2007 [...]
[...] Communicate through technology, ‘Corporate blogging and guidelines’ (21/03/2007). Retrieved on 22/03/2007 - http://lymabe.edublogs.org/2007/03/21/corporate-blogging-and-guidelines/ [...]