Enterprise blogging is sweeping the business community in recent times. In fact, reports suggest that lately there has been a sharp rise in blogs written by company owners, key personnel and blog evangelists, for both internal and external communications. It has become clear that the next wave of social media will be driven by companies who are adopting blogs at an increasing rate.

Sohini Bagchi, Editor - ITBizFocus.com

Experts believe that most enterprises are now realizing the benefits of online promotion of their products, services and other information, business blogging is picking up speed. Writing and updating a business blog is a great way to share the company’s expertise, build additional web traffic, and connect with potential customers. In other words, blogs have the potential to add value to your business.

According to a recent Gartner survey on Enterprise blogging, corporations of all sizes and across a wide array of industries are adopting blogging technologies and practices ten times more than the previous year. About 89% of respondents are either blogging now or are planning to blog in the next one year. Corporate adoption of blogging is entering its hyper-growth phase. More than 50% of respondents have launched one or more blogs in the last year and less than 10% have been using blogs for more than three years, according to the report.

Smaller companies have been quicker to adopt blogging as a part of their communications strategies, followed by mid-sized entities. These burgeoning segments are looking for honest and open communication channels. With more blog articles, posting and comments, businesses can expect proper customer relationship management and proper support and critical business decision making based on actual information and feedback from user and customer groups.

In the US and other western countries, businesses, especially the SMEs see business blogging as a major corporate tool for communicating with customers or employees to share knowledge and expertise. These business owners look at blogs from a social media perspective. Among Indian SMEs, enterprise blogging is yet to emerge into a well defined space. Even though the market is flooded with bloggers, when it comes to serious enterprise blogging, SMEs in India are lagging behind their western counterparts.

However, this doesn’t mean that technology blogging isn’t taking place. Blogs are growing at a rapid pace in India, and many of the SME and startups are even making money from it. However, there is a long way to go before we can call Indian entrepreneurs and particularly the SMEs blog fanatics to capture the market. The reason is obviously that we haven’t yet been able to create an environment that is conducive to effective business blogging. This should have ideally been the need of the hour for a greater business success with the help of social media. All the best!