Welcome to CorpBlawg

2006 August 7
by Cornelius

Well, here I go.

This blog aims to be a source of reliable information and informed commentary on the topic of corporate blogging. Corporate or enterprise blogging is an entirely new form of corporate communication and has - at least that’s what many people believe - the potential to impact how corporations all over the world conduct their business and how they are perceived by customers, shareholder and employees. Independently of whether it’s corporate executives blogging about their stratigic goals or company PR pros using blogs to promote a product, corporate blogging seems an attractive and budget-friendly way of getting the job done. Of course blogging does not take place in a vacuum - the level of interactivity inherent in blogging makes managing the communication process a major challenge, one that companies sometimes find difficult to overcome. The blogosphere can look like the PR equivalent of a highway with no speed limit and no rules - a place where the most perfected comporate image can be totalled in a matter of seconds. The fact that this can also happen without any participation on the company’s part is, however, what makes blogging increasingly relevant to businesses. It’s simply too risky not to participate and remain silent when everyone out there is talking about you.
My motivation for starting a blog myself is twofold. Firstly, I believe that a blog is a very useful tool to organize one’s thoughts and to keep track of ideas (they’re elusive buggers sometimes). Secondly, writing a dissertation on the practice of corporate blogging and not having a blog myself somehow seems contradictory. As I want to understand all levels of the phenomenon, it seems logical to me to participate instead of merely lurk. Thirdly, reporting on how things unfold on a regular basis seems appropriate when considering how novel the idea of corporate blogging still is. It is anything but a static practice and it will be exciting to watch and occasionally comment as it evolves.

So there you have it. CorpBlawg is a blog on corporate blogs, from an academic point of view. If that seems terribly meta and tedious, let me assure you that I’ll do my best to keep things interesting, balanced and on topic (no endless tirades about how blogging will solve all the world’s problems in a heartbeat, I promise). The public will provide the music, while I watch dutifully as the dancers (hopefully) loosen their ties and kick off their shoes. We’ll see a misstep or two of course, but nobody’s ever learned to waltz instantly.

I, for one, have no doubt that the show will be worth watching.

from → About CorpBlawg, Corporate Blogging

1 Comment
2006 August 19
CorpBlawg » A first attempt at a categorization (I) permalink

[...] As I’ve laid out in my first post, the purpose of this blog is to explore corporate blogging as a new form of business communication. One distinction that the most casual observer will notice right away is that corporate blogs fall into certain categories regarding who writes them, what their purpose is and whom they target. I want to make a first attempt at developing such a categorization here and I also want delineate the genre as such, i.e. what ‘counts’ as a corporate blog in my research and what doesn’t. Let’s start with the latter. [...]

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