What are the benefits of corporate blogging?

May people feel that blogs are just web sites that individuals have to stay in touch with family and friends or to complain about stuff. Blogs can and should be much more than that. From a corporate stand point they should be a place to add a human element to what otherwise could be perceived as a faceless machine that doesn’t care about its customers and only cares about money.

Small, medium, and large corporations are filled with real people, and many of them are very happy to be working where they are and love their companies product or service. Many of these same people love to interact with others and tell them how great it is to work where they do… Many of these people aren’t in the sales and marketing group and without a blog would never have there voice heard.

Blogging is also a very powerful communication tool for executives who can keep employees and customers up to date with what is going on inside the company in real time. They can even get into real time dialogs with people via comments that get posted to their submissions.

Customers are people, not numbers and as a result they want to interact with the corporations that they do business with. They want to know that the companies care about them and how their product or service is perceived.

So blogging can be an effective, inexpensive way for companies of all sizes to humanize their presence and stay in direct contact with their stakeholders. An additional benefit that also comes from it can be a benefit to your search engine rankings.

Search engines love fresh relevant content, and if you are writing a blog about the aspects of your job or work that your are passionate about then you will no doubt be creating content that users want to read, and that search engines will value.

Blogging isn’t necessarily easy, and isn’t for everyone. May people just aren’t writers, and others just can’t seem to find the time (it can take a lot of time). So companies are afraid of letting their employees blog as they are worried about their brand, confidential information… and their legal departments get up in arms. The reality is that these same people/employees that the legal department is worried about already have the tools at their disposal without a blog to damage the firms that they are working for and yet most of them don’t.

So what is the bottom line? Blogging can be a very effective way to inexpensively promote (including the SEO benefits), humanize, and interact with your customers/employees, so if you can you should Blog.