Corporate Press to Be Replaced by Corporate Blogging?

The 20th century tradition that local plants or industries should print regular corporate publications is still alive in Ukraine. However, the local corporate press often writes not about the business environment or achievements, but how cool is a particular employee or manager, what nice birthday party or vacation he/she had; and all of this mainly in exciting propagandistic style. This field is a long-term, narrow, profitable niche for dozens of local PR agencies & printing houses, which have been united to develop this business. Moreover, many Ukrainian companies have editorial teams for their publications, whose members are considered to be journalists with legal benefits and retirement privileges. (Twenty years Ukraine fails to update legislation & regulations in jou
alism).

Now it seems as though the situation is starting to change. More often we hear that corporate publications are suspended, its staff are let go, and e-newsletters are initiated instead. Due to the financial crisis, companies are significantly cutting budgets for communications and paying more attention to the fast growing online audience. Ukraine had been already ranked as #9 in Europe with online audience of 15,3 mln, according to Miniwatts Marketing Group report in 2010, published on the Internet World Stats website.

The e-newsletter instead of hard-copy publications is obviously good tool in internal communications. Meanwhile, how Ukrainian firms can keep their exte
al communications at the needed level?

Exploring global PR trends for 2011, I saw frequent predictions that corporate blogging will continue to intensify. Online statistics from Ukraine proves it: according to Yandex report in October 2010, the amount of Ukraine-originated blogs had increased by 1/3 per year to 700,000; and about 120,000 of them are active.

Let’s look at blogging experiences of some Ukrainian execs, for example, a law firm partner's blog in English and an investment firm president's blog in Ukrainian. These professionals write, reply to queries, and build online relations by themselves. Right approach! Because the real communication needs to be a genuine interaction between the people in the certain marketplace and certain employees. The business audience is smart and it hardly will be happy to interact with anonymous, often inexperienced PR people, who disseminate pre-scripted messages.

In January 2011, the social media marketer Mark Evans from Toronto, Canada wrote in the Sysomos blog: “Here’s something that has surprised me in recent months: the number of companies that want their social media tactics to be handled by an exte
al agency – public relations, advertising, digital or pure social media. These companies want to do social media but they don’t want to do it themselves on a daily basis. Instead, they want to create a strategic plan, and then have a partner do the “heavy lifting” such as running Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts.”

According to my communication experience in Ukraine, the right solution for businesses is to have a PR agency help just in preparing executives, directors and a PR staff to interact online, and launching corporate blogs / accounts. The company should not only create SM policies and procedures, but put the selected conversationalists through social media trainings, as well as crisis communications ones. Then the staff will be able to work online, increasing awareness, strengthening the brand, promoting corporate values & culture, etc.

At the same time I am not criticizing those who, having money, will hire a PR agency to serve their online needs. In this case, please, discover conclusions of Peter Schram from freelance writers bureau Communications Unlimited in Toronto, Canada. “In 2011 companies will start to put increasing pressure on their communication suppliers in an effort to pass on the ‘do more with less’ approach to business... No matter how fast technology moves or what new devices are offered on the market, one thing always remains a constant: the written word. Indeed, with a proliferation of new communications channels, most communicators will find that their corporate writing style is about the only thing that really differentiates them from their competition.”

Good luck in corporate blogging! It's fascinating – to get to know your audience.

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