Perhaps the first “corporate blogger” to make corporations sit up and take notice of the blogging phenomenon that started roughly three years ago was Robert Scoble, a VP at Microsoft who started blogging. About Microsoft. And he wasn’t always nice. Microsoft engaged him and encouraged him, now he is with Fast Company and some other ventures. Then others came on the scene. Now, corporate blogs are becoming common place. We’ve helped develop enough strategies for corporate blogging. So we recently did some research to uncover their effectiveness, some of which we discussed in our last post. So, are corporate blogs even effective? Yes. Why?

We believe it all has to do with the nature of the message, and how that message is managed. Time was, the PR and IR teams could “control” the message based on the mediums (print, radio, TV), which did not engage instant, even anonymous, feedback. As discussed before, few corporate blogs engender comments, which are considered a key element of Social Media measurement. Are corporate blogs just marketing noise now? A company may now manage multiple blogs; corporate social responsibility, investor communications, product focused or general company blog.

Our research found product blogs, for more technical products, tend to find more comments from the public. Mostly, they are requests for help or expressions of frustration with service and support. If a CEO or founder is popular in the general public (i.e. Guy Kawasaki) then they can form a following, which helps leverage the corporate image, and comments are commonplace. They key in this case, is that the blog is written as a conversation, inviting discussion. More traditional companies however, such as furniture makers, shoe manufacturers or roofing products are more reticent to truly engage the audience. Such intimate, 2-way conversations place a whole new context on corporate communications.

These companies develop a blog, and communicate outward. But their blogs aren’t designed to engage. The message is “Us to You” yet the very nature of blogs are based on ideas and opinions and allowing room for discussion. At intevix we break that rule because a blog for us is our ongoing Best Practices guide, but we enable sharing, which enables discussion and commentary on blogs specific to the topic, beyond our blog, which also aids our SEM strategy.

So corporate blogs aren’t necessarily marketing noise, but they can be when they are one-way, and then you’ve defeated the purpose by simply creating an extended “news” section of your website. Web participants are smarter than that, and will ignore your message as marketing noise. Sometimes, this is OK and works fine, but don’t expect significant audience engagement. A good measure of the activity of your blog is RSS feeds, unique visits and time on site and how visitors move through your blog. Depending on the nature of the target market and the purpose of the blog, the measurements should be different, and the tone, manner and style of writing should reflect what you’re trying to achieve in terms of engagement. A formal, Us to You blog will be marketing noise, using Marketing Speak and not reflecting the more informal atmosphere of the blogosphere.