Bisongäst: Daniela Terbu on Corporate Blogs: Ways of Use and Challenges

I´m proud to introduce the first guest writer on bisonblog. Daniela Terbu lives in Vienna and is currently working in the Marketing Services-Department of a pharmaceutical company – in that position she is responsible for all e-business related topics, internal events, desktop publishing etc. She’s studying ’Corporate Communications’ at a university of applied sciences and is in the process of starting her diploma thesis which will inclulde the topic corporate blogging. Check out her weblog at http://zuckerwatte.twoday.net (in german).

Corporate Blogs: Ways of Use and Challenges
This week I found a very interesting professional article of Dr. Ansgar Zerfaß – who is also an expert on the topic ’Corporate Communications’ – about the different ways of use of corporate blogs and the challenges of corporate communication. He’s describing the weblogs from the perspective of the corporate communications department.

"The fast increase of significance of social software (weblogs, wikis) and the linked forms of communication on the internet are meeting an ambivalent response in the companies.[…] It is highly visible that in particular the easy availability of weblogs and the dense network of the worldwide blogosphere has changed the framework of communication fundamentally. Numerous examples from all over Europe are showing that very explicit. Now it is time to analyse weblogs not only from the perspective of journalism and media-development but also from the point of view of communication management."

His approach regarding classification of the different ways of use of blogs is very interesting: pretty extensive and also splitted in different areas in a matrix (internal communication, market communication, PR).

In his opinion "the use and launch of weblogs has to be planned very accurately." There are 3 major challenges in doing that:

1. Corporate blogs are launched to support and contribute to the the company’s targets – so there has to be precise inputs which communication objectives have to be obtained.

2. Decision about format and content of the corporate blog: will they be hosted by a single user (for example CEO) or if there are several editors inside or even outside the company. And: what about policies & ethics?

3. Workflow, technology and design of the weblog: continuous update and integration of the content in the internal information systems are crucial. Usability is also playing a major role

regarding the acceptance of the users.