Webinar on Corporate Blogging

I participated in Porter Novelli and Cymfony's webinar on Corporate Blog Learnings yesterday. The session focused on findings from a survey they conducted with their clients.

Key Highlights

Writing & Frequency of Posts

• CEO's and Marketing tend to be the authors. There's little to no use of ghost writers.
• Sixty-six percent stated they post once a day or several times a week.
• Posts should focus more on the industry and issues and less on the company's products. A blog is not another place to post press releases.

Oversight

• Fifty-seven percent reported they do not have blogging guidelines, but of those that do most were larger companies.
• Ninety-six percent stated their posts do not go through legal review.
• Over 70% indicated they have received an increase in media attention.

Monitoring

• There are more companies (92%) monitoring blogs than have blogs.
• Ninety-one percent monitor blogs once a day or several times a week.
• Companies are monitoring blogs for developing trends, competitive insight, tracking posts on their company, and consumer understanding.
• Monitoring tends to be a more manual process with using search engines.

Best Practices

• Be professional.
• Provide similar access to information as you would with other members of the media.

General Findings

• Strong majority believe blogs will become more important in 2008.
• Most companies created their blog to better communicate with customers.
• Two major reasons for companies not blogging: resources and management buy-in. Creating a blog is not very costly in terms of infrastructure, but is very costly in terms of time because to have a successful blog, posting must be done frequently. Blogs may be thought of as breeding grounds for disgruntled customers, which may happen, but it's part of a conversation and not the focus of the blog. When/if that does occur, companies have an opportunity to address the issue, and it's likely that supports will participate in the conversation.

On a personal note, this was my first webinar and the experience was pretty cool. It provided good information, lasted for only an hour, conducted at an ideal time (during lunch), free, and involved two presenters making the presentation more conversational than dictating. Plus, it was a very creative tactic to promote both companies.

Filed In: Corporate Blog Posts Frequency Writers Authors Monitoring Legal Webinar