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Corporate Blogs – Do they have a clear focus? – Birth of ebdex Corporate Blog

I was hoping that I and others would get to know a particular accountancy software vendor better through their corporate blog, which was launched few months back. The articles on recruitment published by their CEO was great! But they seem to be talking more about Microsoft Products than their own company and their own product portfolio. I for one would like to hear about their product road map, various technologies they are looking at (e.g. web services, SOA, etc), financials, what’s hot within the company, how great the company is, their growth strategies, etc (whatever they feel comfortable letting others know).

I have been blogging since April first through blogger and then through wordpress. The idea was to promote ebdex, the industry we are operating in (document exchange and EIPP) and I as an individual. I felt this was important as we are a start-up. And it seems to be working (let me know if you think otherwise – It is important to get feedback from my readers). I am yet to build a faithful readership. I know one or two are regular visitors to my blog.

We made ebdex Document Exchange available for commercial trialling few days ago and at that point felt that a corporate blog dedicated to just ebdex was needed. And we launched http://ebdex.wordpress.com. The reason is that the corporate blog will only talk about ebdex and nothing else. My blog will continue to talk about whatever I am interested in. As we grow, more employees and Trusted Partners will be given access to publish articles through corporate blog. But it should not talk anything other than ebdex. Anything I publish in corporate blog will also be published here. So I maintain continuity.

I was talking about this recently with Dave Stephens of Coupa, who released their Open Source e-Procument platform recently. Dave is doing great and guess what! He is thinking of establishing a corporate blog in addition to his very successful blog, Procurement Central. He just published their first month statistics. Great stuff Dave. Keep the information free! Blogging is great – how else could you tell the whole world how great you are doing! Don’t forget it works in the opposite way as well!

So what is the idea behind our corporate blog? The initial idea is we will use it for all company related announcements (the corporate website is a static website – it is much easier and quick to publish through a blog). We can also use it to educate our customers in terms of how best to use it. We can also use it to justify why we have taken a certain route (e.g. why is the registration page so long! comment already received suggested that he was put off by the long registration process!). In addition, launching of new products and features will be first announced through the blog.

What are your views? What would you like to see in our corporate blog? Do you like me to cover anything else in this blog? Do express yourself! Or do you think this is all waste of my time and yours?

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