Corporate Blogging- A New Marketing Communication Tool for Companies

A corporate Blog is a blog that is published by an organization to achieve their goals and objectives. It is a new marketing communication tool for companies. All browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 allow readers to view their posts easily without actually visiting the blog. There are many different types of corporate blogs which can be classified into external or internal blogs. External blog allows employees, teams, spokespersons of the organization to share their opinion in corporate blogs. When a company launches a new product, the company will introduce their new product in the external blog. In short, external blog is a publicly available weblog whereas internal blog only allows the organization employees to view its contents. Employees can access the internal blog through the company's intranet. Internet blog is normally used in meetings and allow employees located at different locations to communicate.

Example of various types of corporate blogging

1. Company Blog

Top 5 company blogs

=Google

=Adobe

=Flickr

=Facebook

=Yahoo!Search

2. CEO Blog

Example

=Jonathan Schwartz's Blog

=Randy Tinseth's Blog

3. Industry Blog

Example

=Miller Brewing's Brew Blog


4. Department or product Blog

Example

=Google-Product Blogs

=Microsoft Community Blogs


5. Customer service Blog

Example

=My response to Steve Rubel

=ComcastCaves' response to Arrington and other Comcast users on Twitter


Advantages of corporate blogging

Employers or top managers can communicate or contact with their customers, suppliers, investors and employees directly and easily. It is easier to set up a company blog because it is user-friendly for employer and employees to understand the ways to use and update the corporate blog. Moreover, employees can share their opinion and ideas freely in the blog so that the employers will know what are their employees thinking and their job satisfaction. Thus, it enables companies to achieve their goals quickly. Also, it enables other people to give feedback to the company or leader’s progress and the company and leader can seek for improvement from there. As a result, companies will generate big benefits from it. For example, if the corporate blog has a positive effect and feedback, the company's reputation will increase. This will create a good image for the company. Lastly, employers can spread information quickly in the event of emergency. So, employees, customers, suppliers can know the new information or urgent information quickly.

Disadvantages of corporate blogging

Although corporate blogging has a lot of benefits, there are some disadvantages of corporate blogging. First, corporate blogging is time-consuming for companies to maintain. It needs to take several times and energy to keep new information updated regularly. If companies use too much of time in maintaining their blog, it may lead to increased costs rather than benefits. In addition, corporate blogs require good written communication skills to produce a good post. However, some employees do not have such skills to post. Also, there are many cases of workers being fired because of the opinion they wrote on the blog. This is because employees can freely give feedback on the blog; which is a high probability that the employees will be fired if the employers are unhappy with what they wrote. Lastly, everyone can give feedback or comment on corporate blog, so many stakeholders and employees do not view corporate blogging as a credible source. They may trust more on the announcement given in meetings.

Credit Card Debts: Causes and Preventions

People like to use credit cards to make payments or purchase goods and services because of its convenience. Credit card is a system of payment named after the small plastic card issued to users of this system. Users buy goods and services based on users' promise to pay for it. Today, credit cards have become a necessity for most of us and it is very commonly used even among teenagers and students. Therefore many people face the problem of excessive credit card debts. Example of unsecured credit card debts is the total credit card debts which is borrowed from the creditor. Consumers will be charged higher interest rates for late payments. Let's look at the causes and prevention of credit card debts.

Causes of credit card debts

The first and most common cause is poor money management. We must plan our spending properly to prevent overspending. If we do not do so, it will lead to excessive debts because we are unaware of unnecessary overspending. As a result, we will be surprised when we receive our credit card bills with large amount of debts.

Second, gambling also is one of the causes of credit card debts. Gambling is the favorite entertainment for most of the people. However, it will cause many problems once you become addicted. Gamblers would like to take loans through credit cards and did not consider its consequences. Thus, their credit card debts become higher and unaffordable.

Next, saving too little or not at all is also a cause of credit card debts. Today, many people do not have saving habits especially teenagers. They tend to spend out all their money after receiving their income instead of saving. So, it will cause them unable to pay their credit card debts

In addition, many people facing reduced income but consistent expenses problems. Due to recession, salaries of individual tend to be reduced but the expenses are remained. This will increase the burden of individuals and cause the person unable to settle their credit card debts.

Another cause on credit card debts is college students' difficulties in adjusting to their new found financial independence. This is because they are thinking of their parents to help them pay all the debts. Therefore they are not aware of excessive debts of the credit card.

Prevention of credit card debts

It is important for us to prevent those credit card debts. We can reduce our credit card limit so that it will help us to spend according to the limit given. Another interesting suggestion from the web is to photocopy the credit card offers, including the interest rate and terms. Then, write a letter to the credit card companies giving them feedbacks that the competitors are offering a lower interest rate, this will encourage better offers for consumers as the credit card companies will not want to lose their customers.

Next, try to pay double the minimum payment when we can afford it. This means that if we have additional income in this month, we can pay extra for our credit card debts this month. It can help us to settle our credit card balance more quickly.

Third, cut up our cards so that you are not tempted to use them. If you have more than one credit card, try to cut up your cards. This can help you to reduce amount of spending.

Lastly, proper planning and budget for our spending. Everyone of us should set our budget for monthly spending to avoid unexpected expenditure. With proper planning, we can remind ourselves not to overspend. Thus, we will be able to stop credit card debts’ problems and begin our journey to financial freedom.

Review on Internet Security

Favourite Passwords Used Online

Nowadays, we need proper safeguards to protect our personal data since there are many viruses and hackers that may have unauthorized access to our data. A password is a secret word or characters to prove identity for authentication. Using strong passwords will lower the risk of security breach. A strong password is determined by its length and complexity. Although strong passwords is important for us to access personal information in our computer or online account, most of us would like to do the easy way to make the passwords simple such as "1234" or their first name.

According to the research on an analysis of 28000 passwords from popular websites, there are 16% who like to use their own name, spouse or childrens' name as a password, 14% prefer "1234" or "12345678" as a password because it is easier to remember, 4% like to use the word "password" or "password1". 5% like to use names of a singer, television shows or cartoon as a password, 3% of passwords expressed attitudes like "whatever", "yes", "no", and other favourite passwords include "iloveyou", "ihateyou".

According to the aggregate sample of passwords which are primarily from the UK, the most common favourite password is "123" which get 3.784% votes. Next is the word "password" which get 3.780%. "password" is often used as a default password for many programs, so it is extremely common and not secure at all. In my opinion, another favourite passwords used is our IC number which is easier to remember. However, it can also be known by others easily.

To keep our data well protected, it is necessary for us to have a strong password. Passwords should be longer than 8 characters, with combine letters, numbers and symbols. We should avoid repeated characters, login names and use more than 1 password everywhere.

How to Safeguard Our Personal and FInancial Data?

Introduction

Nowadays, identity theft and unauthorized access to personal and financial data becoming a serious problem since interest has been widely used. This is because internet is easier for theives to obtain personal and financial data especially in online banking. Hackers may have unauthorized access to customer database to steal their confidential information. However, even if you never use computer, your personal information such as credit card numbers, account numbers and address may be stolen by someone. Therefore, unauthorized access to personal and financial data is the most important area that draw companies' attention. So, it is neccessary to safeguard our personal and financial data properly.

Ways to safeguard our personal and financial data

There are several ways to safeguard our personal data. First, use and maintain firewall. Firewall is used to block unauthorized access to personal data. All message passed through firewall to examine the message and block those unauthorized internet users. Firewall is integrated into operating system but if you are using older computer, you have to install firewall.

Second, install and update antispyware and antivirus programs. Antivirus programs are the software that used to prevent and remove computer viruses, worms and trojan horses. It can detect and remove adware and spyware. Example of antovirus software are Norton Antivirus, Symantic and AVG. Microsoft and other applications allow user to update antispyware programs. For those who want to save costs, Alwil Avast allow for free virus protection. It is important for us to ensure that our virus definition are up to date.

Third, use passwords and encrypt sensitive files. By using password protection, we use secret words for authentication to gain access to particular resource. Another method is encrypting files to ensure unauthorize access to personal data. However, the drawbacks of file encryption is that we must remember passwords because we may lose our data if we forgot our passwords.

Fourth, avoid accessing financial information in public. We must avoid checking our financial information such as bank balance in public. For example, many people like to access to internet in coffee shops which offer wireless connection Although these systems are convenient, users may not know how strong is their firewall.

Fifth, do not open mystery attachments. We should not open an attachment or link that is sent by an unknown party. This is because these attachments may contain viruses or allow hackers to steal our information.

Lastly, regularly scan your computer for spyware. To protect our financial data, it is necessary for us to regularly scan our computer because spyware or adware may be hidden insoftware programs that can allow hackers to access our data. By scanning our computer, it can detect and remove them.

Example of an E-commerce Failure and Its Causes--Pets.com

Introduction

One of the example of an E-commerce failure is Pets.com. Pets.com is a dot-com enterprise that sells pets or pet accessories to the customers directly. It starts its operation in February 1999 to provide pet products, information, and resources to customers. The major competitors for pets.com are petopia.com, petsmart.com, and petplanet.com. Pets.com was the first of these pet stores to enter the online pet industry. pets.com is the successful online pet store in the beginning of 1999 but it closed down in November 2000. It is the second Amazon aligned e-tailer to shut down the business.

The causes of Pets.com failure

There are several factors that cause the failure of Pets.com in E-commerce. The main cause is it never brought profit for pets.com since it is having negative gross profit margin. pets.com lost money on every items sold because it sells its product at a lower price than the cost to purchase from the supplier. Therefore, pets.com had suffered $7.6 million loss on its sales.

Second, the shipping cost is extremely costly for customer because pets.com is a market that sells low-margin food and goods. Nowadays, customers would like to shop at discount stores which is near to their location because it is more convenient for them than shopping at online pet stores.

Third, pets.com business model are not unique since there are many competitors which are selling the same products. Also, in 2000, pets.com decided to go into public. However, it went into public and spent money too quickly, causing excessive spending on marketing and advertising costs.

Lastly, cost of doing business online are high because they tend to sell products below cost in order to compete with competitors. However, they still can't recover from their losses.

http://pets.com/