Potential issues for corporate blogs

Although blogs provide companies numerous communicative opportunities, there are several common problems that can occur. If a company wants to offer its readers positive experience with its blog, the company must consider these issues in advance and develop a plan to address and prevent them from happening. Having these particular issues, the company will have a useful blog that is relevant to its readers’s need.

1. Negative comments

Although communication with target public is one of the most significant benefits of corporate blogs, it can also work the other way. Not all comments that are left in blogs are positive. The presence of negative comments may not be a big issue on smaller blogs run by individuals, but they can be a problem for corporate blogs. After all, the company’s reputation management isn’t being helped by a blog that includes a lot of negative comments from readers.

In order to avoid potential issues with negative or uncensored comments, all comments should be moderated by an administrator for approval before appearing on the blog. This way, vulgar or offending comments can be deleted without ever being posted to the blog. Yet you should never make the mistake to allow only the positive comments because you risk provoking readers’ suspiciousness. Besides, showing that your company is willing to accept constructive criticism, you will prove that your corporation pays attention to its target opinion in order to improve its image, products and services. Some blogs also require users to create an account in order to post a comment.

2. Consistent and frequent posting

Blogs in general, often suffer from abandonment or long periods of inactivity. While it may be acceptable for an individual to be inconsistent with a blog, corporations should not tolerate such blog behavior because it may be much more harmful to its image that having no blog at all. When visitors come to your blog and see that nothing new has been posted in a long time, it sends the message that the blog is not important to the company and that the organization doesn’t take this form of communication with customers very seriously.

Corporate blogs can have different posting schedules. Some can be very active, with multiple posts each day, while others have posts much more infrequently. Before launching a blog (or when reconstructing an existing one), the company should consider what type of posting schedule would be able to support so that the blog will be an effective communicative tool.

3. Usefulness of posts

Another important issue facing corporate blogs is the challenge of providing interesting content that is useful in some way to readers. Of course, the blog needs to benefit the company in some way as well, so content should be carefully and professionally selected. Although a blog is meant to bring some type of benefit to the company, creating only posts that promote products or services will have poor positive results.

Topics that are most commonly discussed in a corporate blog includes discussion of issues that are relevant to the company or industry, press releases, information to help readers use the company’s products more effectively, and other specific types of content that appeal to the company’s target market.

When examining various corporate blogs, you will notice a great variety in the types of content being published and their usefulness to readers. Some companies do an excellent job of adding value for readers by supplying them with practical and useful information, while others prefer to use the traditional way of advertising. Not surprisingly, the authors who have creative solutions to promotes its company products in a creative way usually have the most effective blogs.

4. Who is going to write the content?

Although the fact that in corporate blogs authors strive to show some sort of disclaimer that the information and opinions provided do not necessarily represent those of the company, the reality is that in readers’ consciousness a blog is a direct reflection of the company. Corporate executives are expected to write often in the blog, but these people are extremely busy with other work, and these blogs are rarely very active.

In most companies however, there are employees who would enjoy being able to share their ideas and insights in the corporate blog. In this case, it’s the company that has to evaluate the possible benefits and threats. A corporate blog is useless without quality content, so the company does need to consider who will be responsible for providing it.

5. Promoting open communication without damaging the company

Because of the fact that blogs provide conditions for two-way communication and because they connect with readers on a personal level, the chance exists that the communication being done through a blog may harm the company in one way or another. In most cases, companies carefully choose the people who will be responsible to publish content, and what can or can’t be written.

Some companies have a corporate culture that is more open and are willing to let employees participate in blogging activities, and other companies are more restrictive.

6. Lack of focus

Just possessing a corporate blog isn’t enough. In order it to be effective for both the company and readers, it should follow a certain focus or plan for using. Companies should consider who will be writing the content, how frequently new posts will be published, what types of content will be published and how the content will help the company and readers.

Many corporate blogs suffer from poor direction or a lack of focus. If the blog is nothing more than a place to publish press releases, don’t expect to ever draw much interest from readers, because it really serves no purpose for them. The most successful corporate blogs have a clear focus, and most of all, its authors understand how they can help readers and the company through their efforts.

7. Converting traffic into something useful

Blogs may be able to attract visitors and regular readers, but the company still needs to convert that into something of significance. The strategy here is determined by the focus and priorities of the blog. If the company’s goal with the blog is strictly to present the company in a positive light and to expand its popularity in the society, then it wouldn’t be necessary to attempt to convert visits to the blog into product sales.