In my opinion, a blog is information that you post on the website which you want to share and communicate with people.

Many of us are doing work that needs us to communicate with each other to get information. The question is how to communicate efficiently at low cost. To get people to accept us, firstly, we should let people know about us, that means, you need to tell stories, talk ,bla bla… Now, you are encouraged to tell the world about your work, tell the customers about your products, and tell the CEOs about your jobs, without asking permission first . A blog is a good way to do this.

The reasons for this are:

First, nowadays, blogs are very popular in the world of the internet. At the end of 2006, more than 50 million blogs were created. Everybody is talking.

Second, at the level of technology, we do not need IT professionals for blogs. You can put your posts or media files on them very easily. The software enables us to use it even if we only have very basic IT knowledge. You just need to update it frequently, and make your blog topics and contents attractive.

Third, the most important thing is –it is free. Therefore, we can say that a blog is an efficient and low cost tool for communication. Well, I think this is one of the reasons why blogs are so popular today.

In a word, a blog is a Two-Way Street . The blogger is the leader for guiding people to get involved in discussions. At the same time, he or she can share ideas and information with his/her readers. “The real goal isn’t to get everyone at blogging, it’s to become part of conversations.” So, whether or not you’re going to write, you can learn where the conversation is and what people are saying. You also can give some comments on what you are interested in.

That’s a fantastic platform for exchanging ideas and thoughts.

I have included some tips from my research.
Tips:

1. Blog design

A good blog design can make your readers interested in it and thus stay longer. This is important to help people absorb information.

2. Good content

Good content can keep your readers coming back. By good content I mean keep your blog fresh (post frequently), and be sure the content of your posts are useful and interesting.

3.Find a “book-dairy” way to do your blogs
For the “book” way: you do need plans for your audience to read your blogs when you are writing a blog.
For the “dairy” way: you do need to present your voice from your heart.

4.Take notice of readers’ comments and always give them feedback

This just means that the blogger should join in the conversation.

In this blog, first of all, I will introduce to my staff what a blog is and tell them how to use blog to communicate with each other efficiently. They are encouraged to talk through my blog. I hope we can share ideas without any barriers. Second, I put the “searching function” in this blog to let our staff feel convient to get information which they want to. Third, I wish I can strengthen our firm culture gradually by giving information about our comany policies.

In the future, I suggest that our company should set up an external blog for our customers; this is a good way to talk to them, to listen to them, to fulfill their needs.

To let my audience feel comfortable and useful after reading my blog,  I’ve done something for my blog, I never forget to put links in my blog which can make it convenient for my audience who are interested in the original articles. I manage my blog step by step to give brief ideas about blogs through posts, pages, and categories, and also I prefer concise words to make my blog easy to understand.

After I’ve done this, I use a strategy to test whether I’m doing my blog in the right way. First, I examine whether I have enough posts for each category which  gives good information about my audience. Second, I check whether I have great comments which can tell me whether I am doing OK.  Third, I ask myself whether I have replied to all the feedback, and whether I have paied attention to the suggestions from the comments?

Hope I have the right method for sharing information!

To deserve to be mentioned, is Jonathan Schwartz’s blog at Sun Microsystems. Although he is the CEO, the way he writes in his blog is just like being a friend, never let you feel like too high too reach.  

This blog is just like an internal EMAIL to all the staff, which can inform all the staff the new business and the change of the organizational management. And this comes from the CEO directly so you don’t have to doubt the truth.

 It can be read by all the employees in SUN Company. So the launch of the new business and organizational change can be known in time and will receive all kinds of feedback.

The staff may be very impressed by the blog because of the particular details including some important internal questions and definite answers.

At last, I think the article always focuses on the cooperation culture, that is, the Sun’s businesses are driven by innovation. This reminds all the staff of their responsibilities and pride.

One of my favorite blogs is “A Thousand Words” from KODAK . It is a place for stories from the people of KODAK. The people share their stories through this blog, meanwhile to introduce the products of KODAK and teach some skills about photoing. It is a good external blog to communicate with people who are interested in KODAK or KODAK products.

Also, Mcdonald’s has set up a new blog named: “open for discussion“which aims to offer perspectives of the company’s aspirations, activities, and challenges. This blog can give lots of useful information for its staff. So, when our firm sets up blog, we also can use for reference.

Assuming you get a blog, and spent time on writing posts, one day , you find that there are lots of comments are just like that: “what are you saying?” or ” this is the first time I coming here” etc. What’s your feeling, not good, isn’t it?

So first, be sure you leave a comment ,not spam. If you think this blog is good, give some reasons to say why you think it is good, or , if you do not agree with someone’s view, you do need to explain why and give your opinion.

Second, the comments you give should have relationship with the author’s topic and try your best to make the comments comprehensible.

Third, don’t make your comments too long, no one wants to read a feedback exceeding two paragraphs, therefore make it concise.

Last, remember to leave you link resources.

“The bloggers guide to comment etiquette” gives us more details about how to make feedback.

One important thing that you should have is ” thick skin“. This article(thick skin) gives a good example which tells you why some negative comments are not as bad as it seems.That suggests you try to pick the good from the bad.

For responding to some good positive feedback, we do need to say” thank you” to them, and assure them that you will pay attention to the suggestions and comments.

About responding to the dark side feedback,  we should have a correct attitude to them—respect your readers.

The fact is, first, lots of negative feedback also provides some useful information, so welcome to it.

Second, rude, nasty, aggressive tone may be because that people misunderstand you, or maybe people using a foreign language, or people from different countries who have different culture, etc. So don’t let yourself be angry and fazed with these aggressive tones.

Try to solve a problem, or respond to an opinion. The method is just to satisfy the reader to the extent possible, make sure you are talking back to them. Or probably, we could set up a guide to provide information which is about how to make feedback to our readers, hoping they can read it and follow it.

1. Journalistic
2. Personal
3. Technical

For our organization, I suggests to use the personal way to communicate with our employees and customers. It is totally different from an essay or a paper, so the writing style is more like conversation and chat. We could much easier for involving them to take part in our coversations. It’s easy for us to report information, easy for people to accept the information as well, also get feedback from them.

Now, we know our goals of blogs, so how can we work smart?

  We need a format guideline for writing our blogs to let employees be participate in our blog plan,

First, I think that we can start by selecting  one of the many third-party blog hosting sites, such as Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, Blog-City.com, Xanga.com, and MSN Spaces.

Second, we probably need to focus on the issues about “legal liability”, that is you should pay attention to the content you write ,whether it is illegal, for example, issues about ”copy rights” and “company information” such as secret plans or data.

Third, when we are writing a blog, we should respect our audience no matter who he or she is.

Fourth, talk to be honest, and always be sure are you taking facts straight? Don’t mislead people.

Fifth, give enough contexts to support your argument, to prove you are right!

Sixth, keep engaging people in feedback, whatever it is a positive one or negative, coz people do have different point of view when reading your blogs.

Diva Marketing, it has complied a list about corporate blog guidelines, check out it, we will get some useful information for how to make a guideline.

I have often produced insight about our organization- it just like a person - with aspirations, talents, beliefs, and feelings, has thousands of cells, who needs blood to connect all the cells, our org also needs internal blogs to communicate within insiders; Like a person, who need to have relationship with others, our org needs external blogs to “talk” with the outsiders.

External blogs:

Well, I guess, the purpose of our external org blogs can be to market or sale products, can be to build brand image, or can be to communicate with customers…bla bla…

Internal blogs:

The purpose of our internal org blogs can be to give some important information to the employees , or may be get some feedback about assignments, sparking…probably can provide a useful tool for information sharing or searching…, by the way to strengthen our organizational culture. (go to a further link :press the graph below)

through this blog , first, I would like to let our employees to know what  a blog is , and after  reading my blog, they will have a general idea about how to make their own blog and give useful feedback for the internal blogs, also can learn some positive ideas from the blogs.They are encouraged to talk through my blog. I hope we can share ideas without any barriers. Second, I put the “searching function” in this blog to let our staff feel convient to get information which they want to. Third, I wish I can strengthen our firm culture gradually by giving information about our comany policies.