We've talked a lot around here about the importance of blogging for your business. It's something we strongly believe in and it's why we build CMS systems with easy-to-use blogging built right in. We believe that blogging is the absolute best way to continually add new content to your business website, and the potential advantages are too great to ignore.

Blogging as the center of your PR strategy

One way to look at blogging is as an integral part of your company's PR strategy. It is not just something you should tack on to your PR efforts. Rather, it can, and possibly should, become the center of your PR efforts. Here are just a few ways that your company blog can meet your PR needs.

1. Your public voice. Your blog provides a continual stream of communication that is approachable for everyone. Media contacts, corporate partners and customers alike can hear the voice of your company through your blog. The voice and content of your blog can go a long way to establishing your company's persona.
2. A central source. Your blog can become the central source for company announcements and information. You can then link back to articles on your blog when you need to reference them from any other location. Others will then also link to your articles and this all works together to build your company's online presence.
3. Feedback and discussion. You can enable comments on your blog and invite user feedback and discussion. This can be a great way to interact with the public, feature positive user feedback, deal honestly with concerns, and become more approachable to your customers and potential customers.
4. Syndicated. Readers can subscribe to your blog through RSS or even by email to get content delivered to them directly. Building a large subscriber base gives you a built-in audience for your message.
5. Expertise. The blog allows you to provide expert commentary on all things within your industry. Through it, you can build your company's reputation as a leader in your field.
6. Search engines. The continual creation of content on subject matter related to your field is a big positive for search engines. This is one reason we believe a blog should be a part of your primary domain. That way, your blog is generating search engine power for your entire website.

One example from Element Fusion

Yesterday, we experienced a great example of the benefits of blogging for PR. I got a call from a television news reporter here in Oklahoma City who was putting together a story about the use of social media tools like Facebook in criminal investigations. They were looking for someone to provide educated commentary on general usage of Facebook.

The reporter did a search for "Facebook Oklahoma City" on Google and, on the first page of results, they found some of the articles I wrote back in May 2008 on this blog as a part of the series I did on "Using Facebook for Business." They got my name and company info by visiting the blog articles on our website, gave me a call and lined up an interview. As a result, our company name, shots of the exterior of our building with our company signage, and commentary from me talking about how Element Fusion uses Facebook in our business were all aired as a part of the story on the evening news last night. This was great media exposure for the company which was made possible by having expert commentary on subjects relevant to our business published through our blog.

Get started blogging

The bottom line is that a blog can serve so many different positive purposes for a company. We highly recommend incorporating a blog into your company's public website. If you need help with it, give us a call. If you have your own blog and PR success stories, leave us a comment below. We'd love to hear about them.