Better business communication

Most of the posts here were about big corporations like Apple, Sun, Microsoft, GM, who are in blogging. But I should say, that early adopters of blogs were really small companies and at most individuals. What are the benefits for small businesses? 

• Blog software is easy to use. Simply write your thoughts, link to resources, and publish to your blog, all at the push of a few buttons. Blog software companies such as, Movable Type, Blogger.com and Radio Userland all offer easy blogging tools to get started.
• Blogging is a low-cost alternative to having a web presence. For small business owners without the time to learn web html or the money to hire a designer/developer, blogging offers an inexpensive method to get your company’s name out on the Internet.
• Updating the weblog is a much quicker process than contacting a web designer with changes or doing the coding and uploading yourself.
• Business blogs provide your small business with a chance to share your expertise and knowledge with a larger audience. A powerful benefit for consultants and knowledge workers.

What a Blog Can Do For Your Small Business [about.com]

A podcast interview with Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, author of the University of Massachusetts – Dartmouth study, “Behind the Scenes in the Blogosphere”.

• Has blogging become a business essential? 
• What does it take to operate a successful blog? 
• How do you measure a blog’s success?

And what for us very important is:

Those businesses that choose to remain outside of this online conversation will be sidelined.  Eventually they will become extinct.

Blog or Perish? Study Tells Business to Blog [Novita Issue Communications Blog]

“Blogs must be viewed as part of the overall package and voice of the organization,” according to “Behind the Scenes in the Blogosphere: Advice from Established Bloggers,”

From one survey of 74 bloggers conducted by Nora Ganim Barnes, director of the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth.

Study: Businesses should adopt blogging strategies [tmcnet.com]

Blogging gives Russell Buckley of The Mobile Technology Weblog quality market exposure he couldn’t get in any other way. Speaking about the corporate structures that restrains blogging, he says that “if you’re worried about what employees might write about you, you’ve got some pretty fundamental problems in the company”.

Corporate bloggers testimonials [corporateblogging.info]

The top executives are blogging by SAP. However to access the posts you should register there

http://www.sap.com/community/pub/blogs.epx

From a business perspective there are several potential reasons to blog. But, as always, it depends on what you want. Blogs are no different from channels like video, print, audio, presentations and so on. They all deliver results – but of varying kind. The kind you can expect from blogs is mainly about stronger relations with important target groups.

• Become the Expert
• Customer Relationships
• Media Relations
• Internal Collaboration
• Knowledge Management
• Recruitment
• Test ideas or products
• Rank high in Search Engines

Why blog for business? [CorporateBlogging.Info]

As indicated by Bill Gates in a speech at the Microsoft CEO Summit 2004 in Redmond, Washington: “if you just put information on a Web site, then people don’t know to come visit that Web site, and it’s very painful to keep visiting somebody’s Web site and it never changes. It’s very typical that a lot of the Web sites you go to that are personal in nature just eventually go completely stale and you waste time looking at it… And so, getting away from the drawbacks of e-mail — that it’s too imposing — and yet the drawbacks of the Web site — that you don’t know if there’s something new and interesting there – this [blogs & RSS] is about solving that.” 

• Build Community
• Easy Web Publishing Solution
• Higher Search Engine Rankings
• Lower Costs
• Better Communications

What are the benefits of blogging for small business? [about.com]

Corporate America is jumping onto the blogwagon for many of the same reasons all those journalists, brooding teenagers, and presidential campaigners are already on board. Unlike email and instant messaging, blogs let employees post comments that can be seen by many and mined for information at a later date, and internal blogs aren’t overwhelmed by spam. And unlike most corporate intranets, they’re a bottoms-up approach to communication. “With blogs, you gain more, you hear more, you understand where things are going more,” says Halley Suitt, who wrote a fictional case study on corporations and blogging for the Harvard Business Review. “Even better, you understand them faster.”

via http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/81/blog.html

• Adobe
  http://blogs.adobe.com/
• AskJeeves
  http://blog.ask.com/
• Boeing
  http://www.boeing.com/randy/
• Google
  http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
• General Motors
  ttp://fastlane.gmblogs.com/
• Microsoft MSDN blog
  http://blogs.msdn.com/
• Boeing filght tests
  http://www.boeing.com/commercial/777family/200LR/flight_test/index.html

More of them

http://www.thenewpr.com/wiki/pmwiki.php?pagename=Resources.CorporateBlogsList