Ted Dziuba, the blogger most well known for the awesome Uncov blog has a great post about corporate blogging on his personal blog called "It’s All About The Page Rank Stupid." As always, Ted leads off with a strongly worded opening:
If you’re running an online business and have hired a consultant who tells you that you should have a corporate blog to "better connect with the community", fire that consultant.
If you have a corporate blog that is only marginally more interesting than a press release wire, you’re wasting your time.
Ted goes on to say that a corporate blog serves one purpose: distribution. Again, from Ted:
Anyway, how does a blog get you distribution if you’re not concentrating on branding? PageRank. You can and should use your blog for link-building and search engine optimization.
He goes on to use Mint.com as an example of a company that is using their corporate blog to build inbound links to up their google juice. They offer a blog on personal finance that has inbound links to the mint.com service on each post. Since the blog is popular and has thousands of readers, the value of those links to google is relatively high.
This shouldn’t be terribly shocking to anyone, but I think it’s valuable for two reasons. First, it reinforces the fact that blogs can be incredibly useful and in a quantifiable way. Second, if you’re not actually writing useful content on your corporate blog that people see value in, you’re wasting your time.
