Loading ...I recently touched on the topic of corporate blogging. And if you’ve read the post, you’ll know that I’m very much pro the activity. But I’m also very interested in getting information systems working fluidly, and at the moment, unless your business is your blog (see TechCrunch), there’s probably more that can be done to further the integration of your business into your blog, and vice versa.
Let’s say you’re starting a blog to create a platform for sending out ideas and messages, whilst also building up an audience. You’ll want this audience to participate in conversation on the blog, of course, but you’ll also want to give them access to your main business as well. Ultimately, the divide between these two mediums, the blog and the business, should be seamless. Many will argue that blogs have to be personal, and that integrating business activites will dilute the purely selfless ‘blogging’ activity from which the blogosphere was born. But I’d argue that this would only be the case if you can’t structure your information and messages in the correct manner. If you’re passionate about the industry that you work in, and you’re there because you want to be there, there’s no reason why you can’t provide a geniune blogging service that is tightly integrated into your business. You enjoy spending your time discussing your industry, and when you do so in the off-line world, you do so in a geniune manner. There’s no reason why this authenticity can’t be relayed in blog posts, even if it is part of your main commercial site.
Excluding the pro-blogging industry, the average business blog is far removed from a potentially seamless integration with business services. Consider the navigation process that exists between a blog located on one URL, and a commercial site on another URL. A community member has been following your blog for a while, they enjoy the messages that you send out, and they have decided that they want to do business with you. What is the next step that they have to take? Do they have to click through to the ‘About’ section of the blog, search for a link through to your commercial site, click through to the commercial site, find the solutions & services that you sell, decide which solution is right for them, and then get in touch with you via email, because your solution can’t be purchased on-demand and over the Internet? If so, there’s got to be more than can be done to cut down the steps required to complete this transaction, and there’s certainly more than could be done to dissolve the divide between the blog community and the business services.
The upcoming UnderTheRadar conference should see several startups announcing their efforts to improve the integration of social media, including blogs, into business services. My one to watch is System One. The have a concise web site, branding that wouldn’t overwhelm that of your own business, and most importantly, good demos of their solution. Koral, Blogtronix and Terapad are all next in-line. I’m not so sure about Brainkeeper; their own web site appears to be built on table-based web design, and this practice is well and truely outdated from the opinion of many a modern web designer. If their own site is built using outdated techniques, you have to wonder whether their solution will be up to scratch. Firestoker will be making what I believe is their first product demonstration. I’ve been following the founder’s blog for sometime now, so I’ll be good to finally see what they’ve been up to. I’ll post a follow-up after the conference.
