Website design Brisbane Australia, web site design Brisbane, blog design Brisbane, Australia, web copywriting Brisbane, web site hosting Brisbane by Flip Interactive

Do you or your organisation make use of the Google Alerts service?

What is a Google Alert? Well essentially it’s just an automated and scheduled Google search of Google News and/or the Google web site index, the results of which get sent periodically to your email address. You get to choose a frequency of daily, weekly or ‘as it happens’ for each alert you set up.

Many individuals have a Google Alert set for their own name, enabling them to find out who has been slandering / praising them online this week, and sometimes why. Also often watched for are the names of loved ones, family, friends, and favourite footy team. Google Alerts is probably perfect for celebrity stalkers too.

Businesses use it to monitor what’s being said online about them, their competitors, supply chain partners, channel partners, their market segments, and so on. It’s a very useful market intelligence tool if you want to use it that way. The possible applications are many and varied, it’s free, easy to use, and here’s but an example. Read the rest of this entry »

Mainstream coverage of business blogging here in Australia has been patchy at best. So it was nice to see Chris Jenkins’ recent piece Blogging the Brand in the Australian IT section of The Australian newspaper.

The article profiles Telstra’s other grand blogging experiment Now We Are Talking. Given it still has a way to go in rebuilding its corporate image, the telco seems to be betting that blogs will help it ratchet up the PR machine just that little further.

More broadly, Jenkins quotes Microsoft’s Frank Arrigo on his outlook for Aussie business blogging, particularly at the big(ger) end of town:

It’s likely that corporate blogging won’t begin to pick up momentum with Australian businesses until the middle of next year.

As more organisations understand that this is a great way of talking to customers and hearing back from customers, they will start to embrace it.

Weblog and Business Log Design

There is great potential for the use of weblogs in all types of businesses and organizations, including yours.

A great weblog design and smart content combine to offer you many benefits, including:

• improving your communications
• improving your public image
• boosting your credibility in the market
• attracting more customers
• providing better customer service
• managing your web site more cost-effectively
• capturing valuable client feedback to help improve your marketing efforts
• extending the value of and ROI from your web site

A weblog gives you the power to regularly self-publish fresh, timely and relevant content to your web site, written in an informal, personable style, at a time of your choosing. As easily as writing an email. No web developers to hire, no delays in publishing.

Viewers return to sites that are trusted, credible providers of information. A weblog is a cost-effective yet powerful way of building trust and dialogue using your web site as a dynamic communications channel.

With a blog, your communications are always timely and on message. It’s also a great way to generate invaluable feedback on your how you’re doing on the customer and public relations fronts.

That’s where we come in. Flip can design and install a customized, self-managed blogging system for your organization, and give you the training you need to launch into publishing with confidence.

And we bring our web design and coding expertise and flair to all blog design projects we undertake to lend some visual elegance and ease of use.

Start publishing with a new weblog or weblog design

Get in touch with us today to get started on your own weblog. We’ll guide you through all the steps, and show you the ropes so you’re up and running quickly and easily.

Contact us here.

About blogs

Heard some of the talk about blogs, but need to know some more before you make up your mind?

Here’s a selection of links to off-site resources that describe weblogs and how they are being used by smart organizations of all types and sizes as the killer communications tool.

Of course our own blog is also a good resource for keeping an eye on what’s happening in the online industry.

Check out:

• Wikipedia article on blogs
• Does Your Company Belong in the Blogosphere? from the Harvard Business School’s newsletter Working Knowledge
• Blogs & Wikis: Technologies for Enterprise Applications? The Gilbane Report
• Blogs for Small and Medium Business Fast Company Magazine