Organizational blog

What does it take to be called a corporate blog versus a business, nonprofit or private blog?  We describe the four criteria we use.
In order to be included in an index, such as FT ComMetrics Blog Index the blog has to meet several criteria.

If the ranking involves organizational blogs, we tend to use the four criteria below:

1 -the blog represents the thoughts and ideas of an organization whereby the latter term includes corporations, government agencies, crown corporations, non-profits, charities – people sharing a common set of goals (registered entity),

2 – the URL where the blog is hosted includes the corporate name, such as http://blogs.company.com/;

3 – if the company or brand has a logo, the blog shows the corporate and/or brand logo, and

4- the firm owns the copyright to the content.

The above criteria illustrate why a business blog, such as the one by Rohit Bhargava ­ Vice President, Ogilvy PR or Jeremiah Owyang ­ Senior Strategist – Forrester Research, does not represent a corporate or organizational blog.

Both, while very interesting blogs indeed, are what we call business-type blogs (see also what is a business versus a corporate blog).

Amazon Web Services Blog and Oracle AppsLab or Mike Critelli, Executive Chairman, Pitney Bowes meet criteria 2 and 3 above. In all cases, while the blog is hosted on another domain than the corporate one, the company’s logo is prominently placed AND it does own the copyright to all the content.

Hence, we can define an organizational blog as:

Organizational blogs are active public blogs usually written by company staff about the organization and/or its products and services (i.e. it includes public service/social responsibility activities such as HungerRelief.tyson.com). Content copyright belongs to the firm while its name and logo are featured on the weblog and in the URL used.

What matters most is whether you are reaching your target audience. The latter can be narrow and very focused, not necessarily how many people read your posts. Engaging with the audience you want to have a relationship with is a smart strategy.

More interesting stuff
Fortune 500 corporate blogging – Bob Lutz GM, Jonathan Schwartz Sun, Randy Tinseth Boeing
Fortune 500 corporate blogging – Boeing, Chevron, Sun and Wal-Mart
Fortune 500 corporate blogging – Nike, SAP and Texas Instruments

FT Global 500 corporate blogging – examples, cases and viewpoints, organizational blog – defined,  adding corporate blog