Showing posts with label corporate blogs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label corporate blogs. Show all posts

The Signs of a 'Loyal' Online Community

Quite often in social media you will come across the term 'loyal' community. While loyal is quite a subjective and proverbial type of word, in a general context it means a community which is there for you and is listening to you.
That is pretty simple to understand but it is still too subjective... I thought of putting down some very tangible points that would be the Signs of having a loyal community.
Frequent @replies or Pings
Sure anyone can @reply you on Twitter and pin you on Facebook, but these pings should be genuine, leading to a constructive conversation. Not the a/s/l type of a chat room ping but thoughtful and insightful ones.

If you are not really generating any of these then make it a point to at least connect with one individual on your community and converse with them!

Generate conversations
A constructive ping or @reply could naturally lead to a conversation. Are such constructive conversations happening often on your community? These conversations give you an idea of the person and might bring forward new ideas.

Reply to your Queries
If you post a query are people responding? With helpful suggestions and tips? This is one of the first signs of a thriving community that people are helping each other (and you) out!

Connecting on Other networks
Often after a few exchanges on Twitter people send me a friend request on Facebook and LinkedIn. This frankly is often spammy! However there are the few cases where you really interact quite a bit on Twitter and then move to Facebook, LinkedIn and/or chat. It makes more sense and is a step towards closer friendship.


Offline Meetups
These are generally one of the best way of connecting well with the community. Having offline meetups can lead to making very good friends who become part of even personal life, once this starts happening then your online community pretty much rocks, cause you have friends on it :)

Any other signs of a healthy, thriving community? Let me know!

social media for small businesses - Powered by Dell

Dell is one of the leading case studies of companies who have reaped big profits with social media. They have a campaign where they are helping small businesses to start using this media for their work.

Facebook
On facebook they have a fan page started in September 2008, which currently has more than 33,611 fans. Interactive page where fans are pitching in with info leading case studies of companies and having discussions. Its very impressive with some really cool customizations.


Videos
Some very good basic videos on how to use Facebook, Twitter, Technorati... Moreover they are powering another small business advice venture. This website also has videos about social media for smbs mainly focussing on UK.

www.smallbusinessadvice.tv

Blog
They have social media posts for businesses on their corporate blog Direct2dell

Community
Digital Nomads is a community for remote workers ie people who work from outside office. Interesting site, with interesting discussions, blog posts. This too is powered by Dell.

I really like this campaign, really quality stuff is being provided here, with just little bits of 'powered by Dell'. The social media people that become part of these groups will be into computers obviously. Great way of providing brand value!

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Top Corporate Blogs

Mario Sundar's blog is one of the few social media blogs I follow. Others I check off and on are Mashable, WAT Blog and Chris Brogan. Mario has just compiled his list of top 15 corporate blogs for September, 2008.
The top 5 are:
Google: Google is just being Google here! :D They have these interesting posts on the new developments, happenings, web 2.0 news and trends on their blog. Comments are off, but I can easily imagine tons of geeks following everything that is written here.
Twitter: I have still not really gotten down to using twitter. But many interesting things are happening here, like the recent post of this blog talks of a TV channel which is planning to take the twits during a political debate and show them on TV, making the screening more interactive. This is just one example on how microblogging is making its way into people's daily life!
Zillow: This blog is of a real estate firm, hence it is the first blog in this list that is of a  non-web related industry. The zillow blog has also been known to weather well a lot of negetive feedback, check this out. This is one of the reasons I wrote about in my previous post about why companies may not get into blogging.

Do you like reading any company blogs or do you have one?? If so, leave a comment and let me know.

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Corporate Blog, Why Not?

In my previous post, I wrote about why corporates are into blogging, but still a lot of companies are staying away from it. The main reasons for this are,

Lack of time, having a well updated blog is no mean task. This requires employees to take time out of their daily work schedule for a post. In countries like India this also involves educating employees about blogging.

Communication Backfire, I mentioned this point in the previous post, that sometimes faulty information gets posted and it can really stir a hornets nest. Another aspect to this is that employees are being given an oppurtunity to write in an official capacity for the company, sometimes they might give out too much information OR they could vent their heat for their bosses online. 
This is actually the main reason why a lot of companies are not taking to blogging or social media.

Corporate Blog, Why?

I mentioned the Mahindra Corp Blog in my previous post, if you have come late (think spiderman, "for those who came in late") then you would want to know the reasons behind a corporate blog.
There are couple of important reasons behind companies starting up a blog.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), basically blogs are much more search engine friendly so for a company to improve it's SE ranking, it makes a blog and optimizes it for SE, this improves its SE rankings!
This would especially benefit online businesses, cause the SE ranking is crucial for their business.

Additional Public Relations, well this is another reason but it has a flip side. Definitely a blog is a more informal sort of communications portal for a company with its consumers than a website. A blog would give personality to the company which allows customers to connect with it.
Now the flipside is precisely this informal communications between the company employees and readers. Misleading and wrong info on the blog can lead to great inconvenience and bad publicity for the company.
More than this what happens sometimes is that well the customers give a very critical comment, and not all companies are up to responding well to this!

Mahindra Universe

This is one of the first corporate blogs I worked on. It was very interesting and I think it has good potential of becoming one of the popular blogs of Indian Corp Blogging Scenario.
It made me aware first-hand of difficulties within a company to get employees to blog, especially in India where a large part of them may not know blogging fundamentals.
I worked here for quite a short time but I learned quite a lot. It made me actually think of social media as a profession with a lot of scope and something I could be interested in, to pursue.