Blogs as form of corporate communication: success factors

Major increase in spread of the internet across the world attracts more and more companies to use it for communication with their target groups. The use of the internet as a communication form, allows access to the target groups at real time as well as give community information about the company at real time, place commercials trying to sell companies products. Rapidly spreading community of blogs across the internet is becoming a powerful part of the electronic web – it attracts companies to make their own blogs as a means of communication which is called corporate blog. On the other hand, according to users survey, most of corporate blogs does not seem reliable to the users as an information source, because usually they are not of good quality, they are usually not updated often – in general they are not what the users usually expect. The survey shows that companies are creating blogs without prior preparation. It seems that such corporate blogs are doomed to failure. However, knowing how to prepare for establishing a corporate blog, considered some factors of success – a possibility that the corporate blog might be successful is quite high. The aim of this work is to analyze peculiarities of a corporate blog as a mean oc communication and to find some factors which make corporate blog successful. The goals of the work are: · analyze importance of corporate communication within the company and its peculiarities; · discuss technological influence on corporate communication; · analyze concept of the corporate blog; · review the trends of corporate blogs; · analyze success factors of the corporate blogs according to scientific theoretical literature; · overlook trends of the corporate blogs in Lithuania; · estimate corporate blogs success factors in Lithuania and compare with theoretical providence. The object of this work is the factors which are decisive to the success of corporate blogs. Theoretical part of this work is written according to analysis of theoretical scientific literature. The empirical part of the work was done by the means of qualitative partly structural interview. After objective selection was done, the decision was to make qualitative interview with authors of most successful corporate blogs in Lithuania. There were accomplished seven interviews within different companies. During this work it was deduced that the decision of the company to establish own corporate blog should not be spontaneous. As all other means of communications, corporate blog should be designed to realize the aims of the company. When the blog is established and starts functioning one should not forget that only the fact that blog is periodically updated does not guaranty its success. During the work five corporate blog success factors were cleared: the dialogue, content, monitoring, time and search engine optimization. These five factors if used wisely may bring success to companies corporate blog. During the work it was deduced that corporate blogs are spreading in Lithuania as well as in the rest of the world. Analyzing success factors pointed by Lithuanian corporate blogs authors it was found that they coincide well with the factors from theoretical part of this work. The content and dialogue as success factors mentioned all the authors. When talking about the time there were two opinions – one that it is a factor of success, other – that it can not be separated from the content. Opinions about the monitoring were also different some authors consider it very important and start their day checking it, others think that only companies which are afraid of negative opinion about them should do monitoring. When it comes to search engine optimization some authors consider it as a success factor whereas others think that audience or corporate blog grows without help of it