Corporate Blogging

Increasingly, my personal weblog experience and my business are converging. I just had a client come back from DEMO 2004–a big conference for product launches. He said that “blogging and RSS was really big” at the show, and was interested in what they could do for his company. A while back, I gave a speech on building online communities in which I said:

Weblogs are another way for other people in your company to get involved. Weblogs are straight-forward to set up, and simple to post to. They�re an excellent way to capture and publish timely knowledge. Engineers are always emailing pertinent articles to each other. Often these articles would be of interest to customers�they�re a perfect item for a weblog.

Blogs reinforce the freshness of your site. There were two items posted to the CapeScience Weblog over the weekend. How current is that? We leverage this content by republishing the item titles or �headlines� on our front page.

Blogs, by their nature, are highly connected. To other blogs, to Web sites, etc. It�s a highly social model, so the blog acts as a marketing tool that can draw other people to your site.

Clearly, I’m a big advocate of the corporate weblog. It provides an effective, informal means of communicating with your existing and potential customers.