Corporate Blogging: A new marketing communication tool for companies

A corporate weblog is published and used by an organization to reach its organizational goals. The blog that was posted and commented is easy to reach and follow due to centralized hosting and generally structured conversation threads. There are two types of blog, which are internal blogs and external blogs. An internal blog generally accessed through the corporation’s intranet. It is a weblog that allows any employees to view. The internal blog may encourage employees’ participation, free discussion of issues, collective intelligence, direct communication between various levels of an organization and a sense of community. It is mainly used as a tool for collaboration and knowledge management. An external blog is publicly available weblog where company employees, teams, or spokespersons can share their views. It is often used to announce new products and services, to explain and clarify policies, or to react on public criticism on certain issues. Consumers can know the latest product of the company through the corporate blog. Besides, the consumer also can get know of the information about the company product or services from the blog.

As the technology continually grows broader and wider, many companies started to have their corporate blogs, either internal blog or external blog. For example, PayPal Company created a blog with the title of “The PayPal Blog” as a forum for PayPal employees know the consumers better. It allows us to connect with the leaders of their company and most importantly, they want to hear our thoughts. PayPal Company has adopted Charlene Li's blogger code of ethics for their blog. For instance, they will acknowledge any mistakes and correct them promptly. Besides, they will reply some chosen and appropriate comments from the users as prompt as possible. The information posted on the blog is link directly to the original source of online references and materials. It can increase the efficiency of PayPal Company and make the consumers have better knowledge about the company. In addition, company can solve the problem and conflict between the company and consumers more efficiently.


Corporate blogs not only bring the advantages for consumers, but for the corporate as well. The blog creates new opportunities for the company to meet other new customers. It is flexible enough to allow a dialogs, a conversation and sharing idea of the company products. Company can build a community with people who are interested in their products or services through the corporate blog. Furthermore, corporate blogging gives the company a competitive advantage that cannot be ignored. According to the research, corporate blogs are giving corporations the ability to connect with their audiences in a personal level, to build trust, collect valuable feedback and foster strengthen relationship between the consumers and company. In today economy, corporate blogging can have an incredible marketing for the company for free rather than spending an enormous marketing budget. However, not everyone is in favor of corporate blogging. Some employees are worry that they will be warned or fired if the blog they wrote is found inappropriate. The senior managers are worry that their staffs will disclose the company’s commercial secrets even though some guidelines are given for the employees in writing the blog. This is especially true for the public listed companies due to the stock market disclosure rules that they need to comply with.

As a conclusion, corporate blogging is useful for company. They can expand their business over the entire world through blogging. However, there are some disadvantages that the company need to aware of. They have to make sure that their corporate blogging is running in a proper way and complies with the legal requirements stated in the corporate law.