Tommunication.com - marketing, communications and public relations 2.0

• Everyone is a customer - Some very good tips by Kris Hoet for those who want to get involved in social media
• ROI of a blog - What’s the ROI of my blog? If you asked yourself this question, check out this post on the Rolling Talks Blog.
  
• Sony Home - Some infos and screenshits of Sony Home, the new virtual world for Playstation 3. Will it be better than Second Life?
• Belgian companies disregard the potential of blogs (in french)

Here are some key results of the Melcrum Survey:

• more than 50% of the 2.112 communications professionels interviewed already use or plan to use social media in their company in the next 12 months
• surprisingly, companies use online video (63%) more than blogs (55%)
• 73% of respondents have no intention of implementing 3D web tools like Second Life for their businesses

Found on: PR Blogger. For more information, go to Melcrum or to emarketer.

Very funny! For more information go to this page.

I just flew over this article (in french) about “Blogs and e-marketing” of Jean-Francois and Stéphane Guérin found on the Brainsfeed Blog. What I’m particularly interested in is their classification of corporate blogs. According to them, there are 3 types of corporate blogs:

• Formal blogs
• Informal blogs
• Indirect blogs

A formal blog is primarly used as a controlled one-way channel to transmit corporate information about the company. It is closer to a corporate webpage than a blog because it doesn’t really favour commenting. Informal blogs on the other hand encourage readers to participate in the conversation. Usually, they cover issues concerning their area of expertise and interest as well as news of their respective sectors. This type of blog can give a more human to a company. Finally, an indirect blog is an unofficial blog of an employee. This classification is pretty simple but also effective because most blogs can be inserted into one of these 3 categories. It also shows if a company really wants to build a relationship and have a conversation with it’s clients via their blog or if they only want to publish their corporate material.

There are infinite possibilities a corporate blog can be used. That’s why it’s very difficult to have a classification that makes sense. In the next paragraphs, I’ll show you two other interesting classifications of corporate blogs.

Here is an older post with 6 categories of corporate blogs:

These types of corporate blogs all have a different purpose, different target groups and different bloggers. It is more detailed than the previous classification.

Another very interesting approach to categorizing corporate blogs comes from Ansgar Zerfaß. According to him, the possibilities to use corporate blogs are different in internal communication, market communication and public relations and the influence of blogs can be informative, persuasive or argumentative.

What do you think of these different classifications? Are they releant?