Many of you spend a lot of time and effort just trying to convince your company or your clients to start a blog. But we think that, in many cases, the need is even greater:
Many companies need to start a number of blogs.
Though there's been so much attention paid to business blogs in the past few months, we're still in the early days of awareness. Whether it's saving time in communication, improving the connection with customers, reducing the cost of gathering feedback, or just participating in the conversations around your industry, there are a number of ways to make the case for business blogs, even if a company is nervous about entering the blogosphere.
The good news is, those rationales for business blogging seem to be working: For every
scare story about blogs, there are dozens of positive examples of how blogs can help build a business. Judging by the
59 percent of CEOs who find blogs useful, the message is getting through.
Okay, but why many?
But if we're just getting to the point where businesses are adopting blogs, why do they need more than one? Or, to put a finer point on it, why does Movable Type
support managing unlimited blogs in one place, and why can you create more than one blog on your TypePad Pro account?
We've focused on offering a good experience for those supporting multiple blogs, because of the ways that we've seen blog use growing in companies and organizations. First, many large companies are using blogs as a simple but powerful way to share information on an intranet without a lot of cost or complexity. In these cases, it makes sense to create blogs for every context that needs one:
* A blog for each workgroup that wants to share updates with the whole company
* A blog for each project team that wants to talk about its milestones or progress
* A blog for each team leader who wants to communicate about goals
or even
* A blog for each employee in an information-focused company
We've had the chance to work with a large base of different companies who use business blogs, and each of these scenarios has become increasingly common.
What about public-facing blogs?
For the more familiar use of business blogs as a communication or promotional tool to the public, it makes sense to have one blog for each of the separate audiences that are being addressed. Hipster-fave scooter maker Vespa makes good use of this tactic in its TypePad-powered
Vespaway blog, which covers urban adventures, while the
Vespaquest blog tackles two-wheeled touring.
General Motors' Movable Type-powered
GM Blogs site does a great job with this on its two flagship blogs, too. The sites differ in approach but share a sensibility, from
Fastlane, a general blog focused on average car buyers, to
Smallblock Engine Blog, a niche blog targeted at an enthusiast market.
What these blogs (and those of other companies with multiple blogs) have in common is a tight focus on a single audience and a sense of purpose that's reflected in a single-topic blog. Whether it's behind the firewall or to the world at large, having a single blog for each communication channel just makes sense, especially when good management tools let you keep track of all those conversations easily. Add in the power of organizing content using categories and distributing updates using
feeds, and it's more and more possible to get the right information to the right person where and when they want it.
everyone@yourcompany.com
A lot of us at Six Apart have worked in IT departments or as technology consultants, and it's easy to remember a time 8 or 10 years ago when many companies, especially small companies, had a single email address. Maybe it was a shared @aol.com address, which one poor soul had to check every few days, printing out emails as they came in and then passing them off to the relevant person. Pretty soon, though, each department wanted its own address or mailing list, and eventually the norm became an inbox for each employee. These days, there are more mailing lists or groups than there are people at a lot of companies.
We're already seeing universities that deploy Movable Type across their entire institution admitting students who just
expect to have a blog in the same way they expect an email address. Today, many businesses may be content with just having a single blog to talk to the public or for tracking projects and work inside the company. But we think that a lot of people who've seen how easy and effective it is to use blogs to share information with the audiences they care about will start to demand blogs for every audience they want to reach.
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