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Blogosphere

Why blogging is important to business

Blogging matters to business, whether they want it to or not. Whether you ignore it or embrace it, it will still have an impact on your business. Here are the reasons:

1. A blog is an informal, easy to maintain method for communication with your customers and for them to communicate with you – A business blog can be an informal way in which customers can really interact and learn more about your business. If it’s just more marketing blurb and not made for interaction, then rather don’t.

2. A blog is an informal, easy to maintain method to communicate with your employees and for them to communicate with you – A blog that only employees have access to can give employees up-to-date information daily and allows for more and informal interaction with all tiers of the business. News can also come from more than one source and allows for synergy and networking even for multi-nationals

3. A blog can give an informal “voice” for your company that educates and informs website visitors – it is a faster, easier way to get information to customers and employees and gives a personal face to the company by talking about culture, value systems etc. Some examples are: Google and General Motors

4. Your employees are definitely blogging – By April 2007 Technorati – a blog search engine – was tracking 70 million blogs and found that 1.4 blogs were created per second worldwide. Facebook receives 40 billion pageviews per month. You therefor want to be sure that you communicate with your employees regularly, so you can assess their satisfaction with the company and know that if there is a problem they will communicate with you, not the rest of the world. You also need to know what they are blogging to ensure that they are not giving away trade secrets or confidential information. You should have a policy giving emplioyees guidelines about what they can blog about your company or customers. Blogposts can live forever. Here is some ideas for such a policy: Corporate Blogging Policies

5. If your employees are blogging, so are those of your competitors – it is quite amazing what type of market and competitive intelligence one can find on blogs. It is a good idea to keep track of competitors’ blogs, those of their employees as well as that of the industry.

6. Potential employees are blogging too – a quick search for potential employees name on the internet, might give you more of an insight into the personality, background, mindset, values of a candidate than what an interview or CV can ever give you.

The power of the Blogosphere is here. It is immediate, interactive and a superb communication and networking tool. We suggest that you embrace it as a critical business tool.