WITH BLOGS multiplying like rabbits, businesses are keen to join the movement, and with good reason: done well, a corporate blog can helps businesses to engage, entertain, inform and assist their clients and customers.
But use your blog as a press release dump and you’ll hear the collective yawn of your target audience.
Many organizations may understand the concept of blogging but generally most struggle to make their blog a meaningful conduit to customers, and so miss out on letting them become their best advocates.
Debbie Weil is a corporate social media strategist who has helped major clients such as GlaxoSmithKline embrace and execute social media marketing. In The Corporate Blogging Book she provides a background on business blogging, offers:
-Tips on how to invite customer conversations; – Addresses common management concerns, such as blogging “taking away from more important things”;
-Looks at blogging tools and technologies, including Podcasts; and
-Offers a cheat sheet for convincing the boss that it's time to blog.
There is also a pile of other useful resources, such as sample policies and guidelines, design tips and a blogging glossary.
Weil assumes no knowledge of blogging on the part of readers, which is important for these kinds of books; skipping stuff you know is far preferable than being forced to research things you don’t.
Once she has laid out the ground rules to corporate blogging, Weil quickly gets to the meat of the issue: 13 ways in which blogs can benefit businesses.
After working through these, it’s pretty hard not to agree with Weil that “blogs are the new corporate Web site".
In the remaining 140 pages she offers further easy to digest pointers on how captivating corporate blogging can help any business enhance customer or client relationships.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Debbie Weil helps clients embrace and execute social media marketing. She is a speaker and consultant who shows clients how to use a corporate blog, Twitter and Facebook to ‘sell without selling’.
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02/12/2009
BOOK REVIEW: The Corporate Blogging Book
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