By Karen O’Brien

The blogosphere is enormous; as of January 2007, the blog search engine Technorati was indexing more than 63 million blogs. And it’s growing all the time; every day, new blogs launch, hoping to find an audience among web users.

A significant number are being created by corporations who see blogs as a means of interacting with the market in a dynamic new way. According to the Fortune 500 Blog Project which studies public-facing blogs by Fortune 500 companies, 9 percent of the Fortune 500 (46 companies) are already blogging for public consumption. A full 35 percent of large corporations planned to launch blogs during 2006, according to JupiterResearch.

GM , CSC ,Cisco , Dell,  EDS , Google, HP, Intel , Oracle , Sun Microsystems , Texas Instruments , Yahoo, Southwest Airlines many corporations such as these are launching blogs to help in their marketing and PR efforts. And as the interest in corporate blogs (which is already sizeable, especially among technology buyers) continues to grow, more companies (perhaps yours included) are sure to follow.

Corporate blogs offer companies many benefits. They allow the dissemination of up-to-the-minute information to the marketplace, meaning companies can respond in real time to market developments, rather than having to wait a day, a week, or a month to reach the market with a relevant new press release or advertisement. And they allow companies to learn more about their customers—and to get the market’s input, right now, this very minute, on their products, messaging performance, and overall public perception, rather than having to wait for the results of the next focus group. To maximize return on investment, it’s essential that companies take the following steps as they launch their blogs:

The first thing any company considering launching its own entry in the blogosphere should consider is what others are doing right (and wrong). Spend time studying existing blogs that address your target market directly. Ask yourself: What are the blogs in your market space doing to engage the market in dialogue? How are your competitors’ blogging efforts affecting the way the market relates to their products and their brand? What would you do differently? Are there segments of your market whose concerns are not yet being addressed by competitors’ blogs? Is the market asking for information that nobody else is giving it, and you can? What are the functional features of the other blogs out there? What kinds of voices are others using to address the marketplace?

Also spend time researching blogs that aren’t published by your competitors, and that don’t address your market. You never know what kinds of ideas you might get by straying from the obvious subjects of study.

Key to maximizing your blogging ROI: knowing exactly what you’re trying to accomplish via your blog. One of the most effective goals to set is a "target action" – what action do you want the reader to take when coming to your blog? Visit regularly? Comment often? Have your blog linked to by others? In the bigger picture are these actions contributing to a larger goal? Are you trying to reposition your brand? Publicize new products? Generate new sales leads? Drive e-commerce sales? Garner market input about your products or brand, or into how you might best respond to market developments? Learn more about who’s shopping for your products or services? Establish your company as a thought leader?

Without clear goals, your blog will lack focus, and fail to be as effective a marketing tool as it might be.

"To be successful, a corporate blog must publish continuously engaging content," says Daniel Riveong, Head of Search Marketing at e-Storm, a San Francisco-based advertising and marketing agency. This requires both quality (informative content in a consistent, recognizable voice) and quantity (regular blog updates, to establish your blog as one worth checking in with regularly).

This second point can’t be emphasized enough: For your corporate blog to succeed, you must update it regularly, several times a week, at a minimum. But to convince readers to return to your blog regularly, you’ll optimally want to update it daily. Typical blog entries are bite-sized and concise and should take the blogger approximately 30 minutes to compose. Before resisting this idea, keep in mind that some of the best corporate blogs usually update between two and four times per day. One way to help share the commitment is to set up a group blog where several people in one department blog around a specific topic.

One good way to get an on-the-ground feel for the amount of work it takes to maintain a quality corporate blog is to create a practice blog first, one you can test and learn from before launching your corporate blog. This might be an internal blog, aimed at your company’s staff, your department, or your immediate team. Or it might be a personal blog, either for friends or for the public at large. If you can’t devote the resources it takes to achieve adequate content quality and updating frequency on your practice blog, you should think long and hard about whether you have the time available to launch a corporate blog.

Finally, if you do launch your corporate blog, be sure to give it ample time to reach and gain traction in the marketplace. According to Riveong, it can take as long as a year for a corporate blog to establish itself among web users, meaning that’s how long you may have to wait to determine whether your blogging efforts are paying off.

There are a number of types of corporate blogs for you to choose among:

Once you know what kind of blog you’re going to launch, and are certain you have the resources to do a good job of it, go ahead and start publishing it. You don’t have to get everything absolutely perfect to get started, or be 100 percent certain of your vision for what you’re going to do with your blog. Some of the most successful blogs are more like a casual conversation with a colleague and less like polished marketing communications. The nature of the medium means that it’s quick and easy to change direction after you’ve started to publish—to change the voice of the blog, or change its focus, or tweak its performance goals. There’s a real opportunity cost to delaying launch; the longer you wait, the later it will be that you begin to enter into the kind of dialogue with the market that can reap major bottom-line benefits for your company.

Figuring out how to promote your blog should be easy, because your blog is just another website—right? Yes and no. Following are a number of common methods for growing the readership of your blog. Some are obvious, others less so:

Finally, to gauge the success or failure of your blogging efforts objectively, you should measure your blog’s performance versus specific, pre-determined quantitative goals. Metrics that can shed light on the effectiveness of your blog include: number of visitors, average visit duration, number of RSS subscriptions, number of contacts, number of comments, and number of inbound links/trackbacks and referring URLs. Most of these stats can be monitored through your blog solution provider, or by using website-analysis tools like Google Analytics.

The potential measurable benefits of blogging are many, and include: reduced marketing-collateral costs, improved SEO performance, improved recruitment performance, reduced customer-support costs, lower PR costs, and increased responsiveness to customer concerns. Less immediately measurable results, like how your blog is contributing to your corporate brand, may require separate efforts to gather customer feedback, such as direct mail questionnaires or focus groups.

Taking these seven steps may not guarantee the success of your blog—but by taking them, you’ll be making sure your company is putting its best foot forward as it begins its foray into blogosphere. Good luck!

Karen O’Brien is a Principal at Crimson Consulting Group where she leads the Interactive Strategy Practice, bringing together business objectives, technology and user experience to help companies deliver effective and high-value web programs. Read Karen’s blog.