The Gradual Adoption & Maturity of Corporate Blogs

Though blogging has been a craze among Internet users for over a decade, serious adoption and usage of corporate blogs are recent phenomena. From unidirectional textual postings by the CEO to the employees, the present blogosphere has grown into a more interactive, focused and interesting domain and is being used to address many important corporate functionalities. The Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2008 has described corporate blogging to be emerging out of the "trough of disillusionment" phase and gradually stepping into a phase of "mainstream adoption". The way blogs are being adopted by large and small companies around the world clearly depict the maturity of this mode of communication for future corporate usage. This work is an attempt to find out how blogs are presently being used by companies for fast and low-cost directed communication, information dissemination, humanizing a company, search engine optimization, customer engagement, developing brand loyalty, gathering market intelligence, promotion and customization of products/services, reputation management, depicting corporate culture and attracting human talents. A study of existing blogs used by different companies operating in different parts of the world is being carried out. Based on interviews with company bloggers, independent influential bloggers and blog participants, current directions, points of concern and future outlook regarding corporate Hogging are being compiled and partially reported in this paper.