How should global corporations 

communicate with local bloggers?

BLOGGERS ?

At the very beginning it is essential to have the idea that  who/what is to be considered as a blogger. It is easy to tell that blogger is someone who has an individual blog or a blog in a blogosphere and at least put something onto it constantly. I find it a pleasure that Wikipedia agrees with it. =)

Thus we can say that a blogger is an individual, that is, not a machine, not a web-robot but with blood. Now take a look at how bloggers are doing in these years. Luckily a general view is provided by the most recent Blogger Survey conducted by Text 100 among about 450 famous bloggers throughout the globe in summer 2009. It concluded 5 points that corporations can take into consideration as I summarize below with some of my supplementary explanations :

1. We are THE Bloggers !
   With more people becoming bloggers, they are calling for recognition and esteem, like a social group, that is, in a broader way, bloggers nowadays tend to be autonomous and have confident sovereignty in their places.
2. I Work for Myself !
   Bloggers call for individuality also. Bloggers are not journalists. They take themselves as certain part of different interest groups and some become well-known and even start to lead the groups. That’s why there is a saying that bloggers are now treating themselves as brands or icons, which necessitates great concern to maintain their unique features.They are not willing to copy and paste the received information but more fond of fulfilling their “responsibilities” of making something for their audiences or followers. Correspondingly there is a turning point for corporations to use the new  Social Media Release towards bloggers instead of the traditional one.
3. Be Easy and Fast !
   Plant RSS feeds in the farm of bloggers, so that they don’t need to take the food from supermarkets far away from their houses. Providing the newest and most convenient way of getting clear and credible messages that bloggers are interested in is an important fact to feast them, especially in this era of information explosion in which they are passively immerged but merited with the right to choose. The investment in advanced information technology makes sense in making better communication. And it is interesting to mention that although sounds and images are more direct than words, they are not deemed as valuable by bloggers as per the Survey.
4. We Don’t Have That Much Time !
   The majority of bloggers are still part-timers, therefore it is crucial for corporations to be considerate enough of time arrangement. Interestingly, the way of making pre-announcements and terms of embargo with bloggers are welcomed.
5. Cultural Issues Always !
   Globalization unites the world with different cultures fused along with localization paradoxes. In many cases it is a big problem to deal with. Asian people are face-to-face communities. Instant and/or solid messages from meeting and dining, using mobile connections and social network gains more trust from them, while Email is preferably a better way to communicate with American and European bloggers. As we are all human beings, there are certain ways that suits all. Bloggers around the globe, as they are person on the net, are most interested in computers and internet related topics. They have high acceptance rates towards friendly PR messages as well.

Hmm…

We could see that bloggers now seem to challenge PR departments of corporations with the big trend of their expansion on the internet. Nevertheless, there are certain fashions that need further discussions, like the increasing use of micro-blogging with high-speed information flows and the social network sites partitioning the internet and their impacts on normal blogging. Although it is not easy  to catch up with the developing pace of bloggers, the most basic concern for communication with them is to treat them like story-tellers with virtual representations on the internet, not merely someone who build and own the blogs.

REFERENCES

http://www.chinaz.com/News/IT/0PD56012009.html

http://www.slideshare.net/text100global/text-100-global-blogger-survey-report-final-1637771

http://text100.com/hypertext/2010/03/social-media-lessons-for-your-brand-from-lady-gaga%e2%80%99s-digital-romance/

http://www.jonathansin.com/global-blogger-survey-2009-by-text100/

Eh..JUST sth. MORE

Interestingly I see that there is undergoing reforming of blogospheres in mainland China. Let’s take a view of several Chinese big blog sites and how they locate themselves to share the big cake of bloggers.

• sina blogs – Big brothers and followers
  sina.com.cn gains its popularity with the project of inviting celebrities to open blogs in its site and thus draw their followers to tail. The question is, how many of them are flogs? However, there are unique blogs that do attract, like the one of HAN Han, with every single but disputed words in his sharp-cut posts gazed by the whole society.
• blogcn – words first
  blogcn.com has just launched a slimming program in this spring which reshaped its mode to the concern for bloggers’ words and stories with great “privacy consideration”. The program is aimed to make blogcn.com “simple and beauty”.
• baidu – virtual friends
  Easily from the second level domain name we could see that Baidu use hi.baidu.com to name its blog groups to show the aim to activate mutual visits between bloggers in Baidu.
• QQ – solo doodles
  Qzone is more likely to be a derivative of Chinese MSN – QQ. It is like an aggregation of private houses, places full of self-satisfaction and self-entertainment. Bloggers knock together spontaneous words onto it after they retreat from the noisy QQ chatboxes. That’s why we could see Qzone-ers post things onto their Qzones but lock them with passwords and even they do so, QQ still show up the seemingly ridiculous notice that he/she has updated something but inaccessible.
• Individual blogs
  Many individual bloggers more or less concentrate on IT and web associated topics because creating a blog necessitates certain computer knowledge. Individual blogs witnessed a sharp decrease in late 2009, when there launched the Internet Censorship in mainland China. Only a few of individual bloggers are “successful” ( judged by statistics of IPs and PVs ). The williamlong.info stands out with his focus and specialty in IT industry with a frequent update rate. “A blog with an unique domain name is your intangible assets.” That was what Williamlong once said.