Corp Blogging Not yet Mainstream

Many social media experts strongly believe that corporate blogs or blogging is a very effective tool to build good and transparent relationship between the top management and their employees, investors, customers, general public as well as media.

Corporate blogs serve the purpose of sharing information such as business decisions, change in management or any other events that happen within the organization. It helps to keep the employees in the loop and integrate them with the top management in a transparent and well-informed manner, says Beth Kanter, a renowned social media expert.

Though Indian IT firms, to some extent, have added a few elements of social media such as podcast, webinars, Facebook page, and Twitter links on their company websites, they still lag behind their foreign counterparts when it comes to corporate blogging.

Take Mahindra Satyam, the beleaguered IT services firm which unveiled financial results for 2008-09 and 2009-10 last week. As the companys website has a blog section, one could have searched for blog post from top managementlike the CEOs message addressing its employees post the results. But there were no such blog posts related to the companys financial output on its portal.

While the media reported and analyzed the results in different ways, its obvious that such news reports could play on the minds of the companys large workforce in terms of job security and future growth.

Ideally, in such a situation, a blog post or message from CEO or top management could boost employees confidence and put an end to any speculations evolving from the external world.

Corporate blogs should be seen a key tool for getting genuine information about companies, its projects and businesses, its employees and customers. It should help to establish interaction with employees, investors, media and others, says Sandip Dhedia, Blogsdna.coms editor-in-chief from Mumbai.
But its contrasting, how the Indian tech firms are pursuing corporate blogging.

Interestingly, TCS the IT services and outsourcing giant doesnt have a blog section on its website. Ditto with HCL.

In India, corporate blogging is lagging behind as it was seen more as personal or individual writing. Though corporate blogging is very important today, companies still have the legacy mindset as far as blogging is concerned. They dont share the companys day-to-day information, business and project updates on the blogs, even for their employees knowledge, points out Dhedia.

Wipro Technologies, on the other hand, has an active blog section, called Wipro blog, which shows the recent blog posts from top executives like Girish Paranjpe and Suresh Vaswani. In addition, top tech experts like Anand Padmanabhan, senior vice president, energy & utilities, Anurag Behar, Wipros chief sustainability officer and others keep the companys blog section active and updated regularly. These blog posts talk about key issues and topics such as new technology and business trends.

Even Infosys Technologies has a well-maintained blog section with regular posts contributed by the CEO and managing director Kris Gopalakrishnan, Infosys Chinas chief operating officer Rangarajan Vellamore, and other top executives.

Global tech and software enterprises like Oracle, Hewlett Packard, and Dell have already set a trend in corporate blogging of not just talking of their own organizations but also trying to create dialog with other firms and leaders.

This makes their corporate blogs more informative, interesting and insightful for readers including both their employees and general people. However, Indian tech firms still need to learn a lot to gain maturity in order to fulfill the real purpose of corporate blogging.

Pankaj Maru/CyberMedia News
maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in