After reading an article on the mistakes that are made in regard to company blogs, I have been thinking about their value.

So what exactly is the value of a company blog? I’m not an authoritative source on this issue at all. I’ve thought about it before today, when working on building my own company (that is currently on hiatus), but I’ve never actually collected my thoughts on it.

My first plan on creating a company blog was to make it development focused. It would be more of a programming blog than a company one. If it generated any sales, great, but the focus would be to give back to the programming community and contribute ideas, code snippets, and so on. Many company blogs follow this model, although a lot are probably at least somewhat detached from the company and come from the point of view of a specific developer rather than representing the company as a whole.

Would this be effective, though? What is the purpose of a company blog? I’m not entirely sure. This would attract developers, presumably, but is that what we want to do in order to make the company successful? Is the point of running a company blog to contribute to the success of the company?

Another approach would be to generate content that is relevant to the interests of the company. This could mean anything, so let me be more specific. The blog could include recent news about the company’s products, creative ways to use the company’s products, or the top features of the products based on user feedback. This blog would be valuable for all users rather than just programmers and could also generate sales for the company.

That seems like a good idea! But I’m wondering if a blog could be created that would have value to the company as well as the users. Because of my English classes, I have begun to see writing as a tool for organizing thoughts as well as a tool for conveying ideas. I remember back a long time about when I was working on a project involving the intelligence cycle (which I still don’t understand but the man in charge seemed to) that had a completely internal blog for communication among developers. That’s a pretty cool idea. I wonder if any other organizations have internal blogs? The project wasn’t successful but it helped me to understand that blogging was a tool in the same way that writing is since, without a doubt, blogging is writing.

Once we get the company started back up, if we ever do, these are just some things that we will have to think about.