Corporate Blogs

I just found the corporate blog of Southwest Airlines. It is very refreshing to see the increasing number of corporate blogs. The reason that a corporate blog is very useful is that EVERY employee in the company can talk to the customer.

Let us look at an example to judge the importance of corporate blogs. Just for kicks, let us take the example of a website. If there was no blog and there was a new update happening to the website in a month, then there would be an announcement on the website . For the sake of argument, even if the announcement was there on the home page, there would be very few users who would actually know of the coming updates. The first reason is that they may not even visit the website within that one month and the second reason is that very few users actually read ads on a website.

Think of the same scenario where the company has a blog and a rss feed. Then, every user who is subscribed to the rss feed will know the new features that are coming out. The awareness of the upgrades and the marketing of the new information is faster and wider.

No wonder the adoption rate of IE7 is faster than was with IE6. The Internet Explorer team has a great blog and they talk about any bugs with the browser and also the new functionalities implemented with the browser. That tells me, the user, that the company is (a) aware of any issue and (b) they care about me.

Importantly, all the employees of the company know the real problems that the customer/company is having and provide input if they can. Currently, all companies have a big silo named CUSTOMER SERVICE that handle customer problems.