By: Master Web Creations
9/20/2005

Many technological corporations are jumping on the blog bandwagon. But what is a blog? Blog is short for web log and is named after personal journals that are shared with the wide world on the web mostly focusing on opinion using a technology designed for news feeds. Now that the term is explained in detail, it makes you wonder why businesses are interested in having a blog.

For the past year, as they have grown in popularity and use by businesses, many bloggers and traditional media representatives have taken their stand on whether press releases are dead, whether blogs should be used by businesses at all and many other issues that may arise from personal opinions being published by a corporation.

At least two major cases have helped blogs increase in popularity and made news headlines and blog topics alike. The first involved politics and the second is heading to the Supreme Court. To summarize the impact that blogs have in politics: two South Dakota blogs favored a particular party that won the Senate race. There were no disclaimers on the blog sites that the authors were on the party’s payroll. [1] The second case is one in which the blogger (or owner of the blog site) is being sued by a company that was discussed in the user opinions. The topic of discussion centered on Search Engine Optimization and search engine spamming. [2]

These two cases are only a part of what blogs are becoming. Let’s compare a blog to a press release to get a better perspective.

Blogs are an outlet, a form of expression, for teenagers, poets and industry professionals. They facilitate communication of opinions in an interactive manner by allowing users to post responses. They are fast, frequent bursts of information with quantity being the greatest product.
Press releases are a form of news writing, meant to announce facts of a corporation. They are carefully constructed according to the Journalists code of ethics and use proper English and appropriate grammar. They are timed for release at specific points according to the facts they present. Press releases favor quality over quantity.

If you take into consideration that a website is designed for the user to be able to find the information they are looking for easily, as well as to be visually pleasing while presenting data, there are some disadvantages to using blogs for business. While blogs publish material faster, that eventual mass of data will likely not be qualitative. In addition, it would be in the company’s best interest to steer away from having an opinion on anything other than their own product, service or reputation.

However, if you examine the technology behind blogging, there could be several advantages to business use of blog technology. Publishing a piece of information that the customer can respond to could facilitate and increase the flow of communication.

Look at Macromedia and IBM, two major players in computer hardware and software industries. Both sites embraced blogging and use it differently.

Macromedia provides a blog site, separate from the company site, for their broadest customer base – the Macromedia developers. While they refer to it as Blog on the corporate site, the heading is “Macromedia XML News Aggregator” which leads away from the mass of opinion. Because the content of the feeds come from other websites, there is a wide variation of questions, opinions and information. Thus, XML serves a purpose that varies from site to site. While XML is a technology that is widely used, there is no standard guideline for usability. Thus, Macromedia allows anyone to submit any type of feed to the Blog site, regardless of the quality of content. Unless they manually approve or remove feeds that aren’t related, it could become a problem. The news feeds are frequently used in a manner to promote a website and increase its link popularity for better search engine rankings with Google.

IBM has hired a professional blogger to increase the amount of new content and site updates. They have not abandoned Press Releases or News Stories. Each area of their site provides different kinds of news: the blog includes personal experiences of IBM’s blogger that relate to some of the news stories or press releases. The blog remains objective while containing a personal touch in addition to facilitating user response and customer relation. IBM is a large corporation with a well-designed site that maintains structure; the blog, news and press releases are easy to find without feeling lost.

If you are considering using a business blog, plan it carefully, don’t forget any applicable disclaimers and ensure that you have the time to devote to it. Consider news articles as a traditional alternative – while you do need to devote time to writing the article, any feedback about that article will remain private and you aren’t devoting yourself to daily or weekly articles. Newsletters are also an alternative form of communication on a regular basis, in which you could include not only objective, informative news articles, but editorials, guides and product or service advertisements as well. Only you can decide which form(s) of customer relations would be the most beneficial return on investment.

Because there are many ways of using blogs and many kinds of blogs, with no guidelines for use or classification of them, one way to sort through the mass of information is to apply some usability principles to improve the quality and structure. IBM’s blog is closer to an objective editorial than it is to a poetry blog, and each piece usually relates to some piece of news or press release from IBM, so it needs a new name and an additional line in the heading that links to the related story or release. Macromedia uses categories to classify some of the ‘news feeds’, according to the Macromedia software category that the feed was initially loaded to. Macromedia could use some sub-categories that address the many different types of information presented – these can vary from questions about how to perform a function in a product, advertisements for other useful products or ideas, new or useful functions in specific product versions and answers to questions on how to solve a particular problem. Since XML has both required and optional tags that are ready for use such as the channel category and the item category, they would be better served as required tags, in addition to the description and titles.

~ a www.masterwebcreations.com article