Corporate Blogs and why CEOs in Australia should start a blog

Recently the CPA of Australia (Chartered Practicing Accountants) published an article by Ed Charles, a freelance writer encouraging Australian accountants to start a blog and start blogging. The article discusses the basics of blogging as well as the rules of corporate blogging and the differences between a website and a blog.

 

Surprisingly, a critical message from article is the lack of corporate blogs and CEO blogs in Australia. Outside of Australia and apart from the IT sector there are plenty of corporate blogs, some which come to mind are Boeing, GM and the NBA.

 

One of the most interesting is the Boeing Blog by Randy Baseler, Vice president of marketing for Boeing Commercial Airplanes in Seattle. Randy discusses new projects or concepts such as the flight deck for the new 787. The Boeing blog is a great demonstration on how a corporate blog reflects the culture of the organisation it represents.

One of the few corporate blogs in Australia is by Trevor Cook, director of PR firm Jackson Wells Morris who has been blogging since late 2003. He says one of the advantages of blogging is that it allows companies to communicate with their clients in a more personal and authentic way.

Recently we introduced our own corporate blog called the Wiliam Reading Room which is a plugin to the popular Sitedock Content Management System. The Reading Room gives the team at Wiliam the opportunity to share articles, advise clients of software updates, commence business / technology discussions and much more. Our design team have recently used the reading room to discuss design trends and the development team have used it to discuss new technologies and efficient interactive ways of programming.

 

Apart from just writing short articles on a corporate blog, CEOs could use new technologies such as podcasting or Vlog (videoblogging). Recently Bill Gates did a short video with Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble which has been viewed more than 50,000 times. Robert said the total time taken for the interview was just 17 minutes, just compare that to the time taken doing a traditional speech or lectures plus travelling time. CEO's who are keen to start blogging but are time poor, should seriously think about videoblogging if they can't afford the time to write a decent length post.

 

Across the blogoshpere there have been many discussions about the ROI (return on investment) from blogs. From our experience, since developing the Wiliam Reading Room three weeks ago we have seen a dramatic increase in enquiries, web traffic and most importantly confirmed new projects for the Wiliam team.

 

We believe that there is certainly an opportunity for CEOs and businesses in Australia to become a pioneer in their industry/market. Its not every day that opportunities like becoming market leader comes along, especially with little risk.

 

For more information about creating a corporate blog for your website contact us.