week 6 ~ Corporate blogging: A new marketing communication tool for companies

Corporate blogging is occurred when a company creates a blog for achieving its business objectives, and it also used for internal and external communication. For internal communication, organization used it as a part of company Intranets and it also helps the organization to promote the sharing of information of work-related matters for the employee conveniences. Organizations use the corporate blogging as a medium to distribute information and inform on the current happenings to all the employees.

For external communication, corporate blogging also is an effective way to use to communicate with the public, which include the clients, media, and customer, especially when all of them come from different places or country. Organization can use this blog to conduct the public relations activities, public can post their opinion about the company’s new product and services in the blog.

There have some successful corporate blog, which are:
1. Kodak's Ofoto.com: Ofoto Blog
- It is used to get feedback and resolve issues with Brownie, a new beta Mac application (found via BeConnected)
2. PerceptionAnalyzer: Dial.log blog
- It has a nice mix of posts on their product and on relevant news & information for their target audience

Pros of corporate blog:

• Company can directly communicate with customers, suppliers, and employees, helping disseminate and explain strategy and reach more employees with a single message
• Be more accessible and give the writer an opportunity to answer critics in a controlled forum
• Create a searchable archive of thoughts and ideas
• Employees' questions and feedback will be permanently recorded on a blog

Cons of corporate blog:

• Poor written blogs can look fake, they might reveal incompetence on the part of the writer
• The writing can be difficult unless the CEO loves to write (in which case this becomes a positive)
• Ill-judged comment could be seized upon the media, investor and related party
• Puts the CEO “out there” and writing ability and though process will be scrutinized

written by ~siew wan~

Review a Local E-commerce Site

Blooming Florist become more famous in Malaysia for the past twenty two years. It started the business in 1981 and managed by May and Martin Cheah. They provide floral fresh cut flowers for all occasions such as Roses, Tulips, Gerberas, Lilies and Heliconias. They also provide services like fruit baskets, hampers, gifts, cakes and candies to the customers. Blooming Florist has six retail outlets that links with 75,000 florists worldwide through its membership in Interflora Pacific Unit Limited. Their commitment is to provide QUALITY FLOWERS and QUALITY SERVICE to the customers.

The design of the website of Blooming Florist is very attractive because there have colorful layout that consists of different type of flowers. From the top of the website, there have icons such as, home, hand bouquets, flowers and gifts, baskets, congratulations and seasonal. Under the congratulations category, there have products such as ‘twin happiness’ (RM190), ‘prosperity always’ (RM265) and ‘success all the way’ (RM210). For the seasonal purchase, there have products like ‘gong xi gong xi’ (RM408), ‘yam seng’ (RM828) and ‘golden success’ (RM828).

The website also provide search engine for the convenience of the customers to search the certain products such as flowers, hand bouquet, cookies, wines or fruits baskets. Moreover, there have some payment methods that provide by the Blooming Florist. It includes online credit card payment, online banking, mobile payment, pay using Kawanku ATM, open bill payment and cash payment.

From the website of Blooming Florist, there also have icons of ‘shop by products’ and ‘shop by occasions’. It makes the customers to shop the website in more convenient way. Under the ‘shop by occasions’ category, there have occasions such as ‘happy birthday’, ‘wedding’ and ‘new baby’.

As the conclusion of overall, the website of Blooming Florist is well design enough to gain the attraction power of the users that view on the website. The website also categorizes all the products in systematic way and it helps customers to search the product they want easily.

A review on a post on e-tailing from E-Commerce blog

E-tailing is known as electronic retailing which deals with selling products and services via the Internet. That are many companies using e-tailing to sell their products through Internet.

Walmart.com is the website created by Wal-Mart. It aims to provide consumers to easy access to Wal-Mart store. Walmart.com provides online shopping feature to bring customers the best shopping experience on the Internet. It provides a great selection of high quality merchandise, friendly service and low prices on purchase product.


http://www.walmart.com/

Walmart.com has launched a new program “Site-to-Store” in the website. This program allows customers order products via Internet and have the orders being delivered to the nearest Wal-Mart store for free. Therefore, customers can get the product in shorter time.



In order to know the favorable products of customers, Walmart.com was introduced “Products and Merchandise Rating and Review Systems”. These systems allow customers give rating and review on the product that they had bought. The rating systems were implemented as a strategy to increase customers’ loyalty and stickiness of the website. The larger website such as Amazon and eBay also implemented these systems because these systems enable Wal-Mart to interact with its customers and understand their needs.

Besides that, Walmart.com also provides a “Wish List” system. The purpose of using wish list is allowed the customer’s family and friends are able to buy a perfect gift to the customer that he wants and the guests are able to get the lower cost in buying the gift. Wal-Mart will allow the customer’s guests access to the wish list either online or through a Wal-Mart store in order to get better understanding on the customer need.

Walmart.com is a successful website that has implemented e-tailing. These systems have help to increase the sales of Wal-Mart.