About E-Commerce....: Corporate Blogging - A new marketing communication tool for companies.

A corporate weblog is published and used by an organization to reach its organizational goals. Currently, all major browsers (including Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer 7) support RSS technology, which enables readers to easily read recent posts.
There are 2 types of corporate blogs:
1. Internal blog - generally accessed through the corporation's Intranet, is a weblog that any employee can view. Many blogs are also communal, allowing anyone to post to them. The informal nature of blogs may encourage:
· employee participation
· free discussion of issues
· collective intelligence
· direct communication between various layers of an organization
· a sense of community
2. External blog - is a publicly available weblog where company employees, teams, or spokespersons share their views. It is often used to announce new products and services (or the end of old products), to explain and clarify policies, or to react on public criticism on certain issues.

Advantages of corporate blogging:
(1)Leaders can communicate directly with customers, suppliers and investors, as well as employees, helping disseminate and explain strategy.
(2)Compared with conference or printed memos to all staff, enterprise blogs are highly cost effective.
(3)Sharing ideas freely in an honest voice brings the blogging companies new connections and generate trust which will lead to business opportunities galore.
(4)Blogging establish those corporation that updated consistently as a thought leader in their industry.

Challenges in corporate blogging includes :
(1)Hard to measure success: Marketers measure campaign success through visits and registrations. The problem with blogs is that social software success could take the form of comments, trackbacks, and qualitative intangibles. With management looking for those raw numbers, how does one succeed?
(2)Legal problems: Two way dialogs that allows objective and negative content is scary for legal. Furthermore, how do corporations react to colleagues that may look like they are making promises on behalf of the company?
(3)No ending date: Blogs aren’t marketing campaigns, there is no ending flight. Bad blogs may whimper along for months, great ones will also continue on. So, at what point does one stop?
(4)May require a lot of time: The biggest cost in blogging is not money, but it is the time. When this comes to executives, the cost per hour may radically increases. For an example, an executive may need to spend 1-2 hours every morning to manage the blog.
6 most popular corporate blogs:
1. Google