Jul042006
Businesses wake up to blogs
Filed under Blog Trends by Michael Klusek at 1:36 pm on Jul 04 2006
About 5 percent of Fortune 500 companies have entered the so-called blogosphere, creating external online journals aimed at creating open dialogue with customers, according to Fortune magazine.
And on March 29, one Fortune 500, The Coca-Cola Co. (NYSE: KO), took its first step into the world of corporate blogging, albeit a baby step.
Coke’s blog site, now allowing 50,000 employees to share ideas with each other, isn’t the laissez-faire, just-about-anything-goes external blogs of companies such as Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) and General Motors Corp. (NYSE: GM). But it is indicative of the growing realization that blogs can be invaluable tools for companies wanting to disseminate and receive information in ways traditional media could never deliver.
Every day in the United States, 700,000 blogs, or Web logs that allow posters to express views on a variety of subjects, are posted on the Internet, according to popular blog search engine www.technorati.com.
Many of those blogs — read regularly by 50 million Americans — are on issues affecting every kind of company, from startups to Fortune 500s.
In January, cable provider Cox Communications Inc. launched an external blog called Digital Straight Talk, a source of opinions on issues affecting broadband customers.
Users on www.digitalstraighttalk.com can post and read viewpoints on high-definition television and other technologies, and even hear podcasts — or digital audio Internet files — of Cox President Pat Esser discussing the digital home of 2010. Typical users, said Cox spokesman David Grabert, are high-end customers, analysts and reporters.
He said Cox was the first major cable provider to launch such a blog and did so to cut through the misinformation presented by competitors, especially since the cable industry has grown increasingly competitive of late. With new pressures from telecos, Grabert said, Cox needed an outlet to quickly and informally respond to customer confusion.
Although posted comments are filtered by Cox, dissenting or negative views are allowed.
"We want it to be a dialogue," Grabert said. "We don’t want it to be just another piece of our PR machine."
Although blogs pose problems for companies — Apple Computer Inc., for instance, was blasted recently in the blogosphere for low-life batteries in some iPod units — Grabert said the benefits often outweigh the downsides.
