Companies like Boeing, IBM, and Stonyfield Farm make it part of their business communication strategy. With over 30 million blogs in cyberspace, businesses need to understand how blogs work and affect their own organizations.
Blogging for Business targets interested business bloggers as well as businesses who understand the importance of tracking blogs.
Bloggers talk about everything including good and bad experiences with businesses. The authors explain how blogs differ from other online tools, how businesses use blogs both internally and externally, and why and how businesses monitor blogs.
Businesses take advantage of the blogosphere (blog world) by sending pitches to the bloggers in hopes they write about their product or services. Just like pitching to the media, there are right ways and wrong ways to go about communicating with bloggers. About half of the book covers how businesses use blogs.
The other half discusses creating and managing a blog from planning through legal issues. The authors show how to make money with a blog, create one, promote it, use search engines, and measure the results.
The authors look at blogging apps that don’t require one drop of programming knowledge as well as those that do. They cover the options available for building a blog and guide the readers through the technical parts without scaring them away with HTML-speak.
The authors don’t talk down to the reader even though the book is a quick and flowing read. The conversational writing uses stories to show how businesses handle blogs. As expected, the book as a companion site and blog.
Experienced bloggers will find the creating blog half-familiar, but the other half could prove priceless as businesses tracking and communicating with other blogs is new. Organizations big and small will value the tips on tracking and responding to blog conversations.
Since many employees have blogs, executives need to understand what they’re about in case they need to create policies to ensure employees maintain the companies’ integrity. Holtz and Demopoulos did a fine job of explaining blogs and why businesses should care about them. Readers will easily absorb the contents and concepts so they can take action.
Title: Blogging for Business
Author: Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos
Publisher: Kaplan Business
ISBN: 1419536451
Date: February 2006
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272