A new survey has been initiated to look more closely at the Corporate Blogging phenomena. John Cass has organized the survey to gain insight into the corporate blogging process.

As he describes on his site:

Corporate blogs are a new entity on the web in the last year or so. I’ve been wondering if they actually fulfill a customer’s need, and differently than a normal website. I have some ideas why a corporation might develop a blog, but I was wondering what blog readers thought about the whole idea. I’d like to propose this survey. If you have a corporate blog, and would like to post this survey, let me know your readers answers.

1) Why do you read corporate blogs?

2) How does a corporate blog differ from a website/forum/email/other marketing effort in your mind?

3) How should a corporate blog be structured? What content do you expect to see?

Source: PR Communications, “Corporate Blog Visitor Survey”

Interestingly enough, I am fairly convinced that the notion of Corporate Blogging is bound to undergo quite a bit of differentiation. It seems that the term is entirely too broad to truly address the various uses and approaches for a blog both internally and externally to a company or corporation.

If I was to loosely begin to categorize the types of corporate blogs that may/should exist, the list would look something like this:

• Management - Employee Blogs - These types of blogs would ideally capture information that needs to be distributed throughout the enterprise in a top-down manner.
• Manager - Member Blogs - These types of blogs are ideally similar to the Plogs discussed last week where management and team members freely exchanged and updated
• Employee Knowledge Blogs - These types of blogs are more knowledge management tools than anything else. Similar to a personal blog, this blog might serve as a journal for work-related notes, ideas, and documents.
• Employee Community Blogs - These types of blogs cater to the social needs of employees within an organization. Naturally, there are non-work events and activities that occur throughout the year and employees often share participation on differing levels. The Community Blog provides a central reference for “What’s Going On”.
• Customer Service / Retention / Community Blogs - These types of blogs are customer-facing and authored by any number of employees and executives internal to the company tasked with roles like customer service or product development. Macromedia makes excellent use of this format in many places, like John Dowdell’s or Sean Corfield’s blog.
• “Corporate” Blogs - This type of blog is a highly filtered collection of tidbits and news that the organization as a whole wishes to share with the world.

Interestingly enough, I’ve worked with a client that is implementing some, but not all, of these different types. The approach I proposed there was a “universal” taxonomy with individual customization. In this arrangement, simple RSS aggregation along the lines of the taxonomy would provide users with a Yahoo-like directory of knowledge stored within the minds of the organization. Personal categorization attempts to leave room for individuals to equate ideas in their own keywords. The system hasn’t launched but I am curious how it will play out in the long run.

Did I miss any types? Let me know.