By M. Isi Eromosele

A blog can be a useful communication channel. By providing companies with unvarnished feedback from customers, it can serve as an early-warning system for product or service problems. It can also provide an easy and inexpensive way to deliver specialized information to narrow segments of the target market. And because subscribing to a blog is a snap, it can be a great way to distribute updates, new product announcements, and other periodic messages.

There are a few rules of thumb that can help companies reap the benefits of a blog while sidestepping the pitfalls. The company should make sure it has a clear business goal for its blog and don’t deviate from it. Remember that, for companies, blogging is not an ideology - it’s a communication tool.

Second, company blogs must reflect the companies’ desired images and support their respective strategies. Corporate blogs has to be designed as part of a larger coordinated effort to rebuild the companies’ reputation.

When properly done, a corporate blog can have tremendous value. Below is a list of 5 companies that really get corporate blogging and produce blogs that are informative, fascinating, and a joy to read.

• Dell – Though Dell’s corporate blog rarely strays from Dell-centric news, the company posts with a great conversational voice, often interspersing breaks news on their blog.
• Lenovo – Lenovo intersperses posts about its product line with musings about business, design, life, and technology.
• Adobe – Adobe offers a huge collection of employee blogs, many of which are great reads. By allowing employees to blog, Adobe has empowered them to evangelize the company’s products.
• Southwest Airlines – Southwest Airlines’ “Nuts About Southwest” blog doesn’t take itself too seriously - and that’s a good thing. The company blogs about itself and the airline industry with a personal touch.
• 37 Signals - 37signals rarely blogs about their products anymore (they split off a separate product-only blog for that), but instead shares advice and insights about business, design, editorial, and other topics.

Reasons Why Corporate Blogs Fail

• The blogs do not have a unique, compelling voice - one that evokes passion and incites connection with the readership.
• The blog do not contain, at a minimum, several unique components that make them recognizable to web audiences as blogs.
• The corporate blogs’ content does not match the target audiences they are going after. As such, no human bond is created.
• This is the worst sin of all. The corporate blogs try to market or sell the companies’ products of services.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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