branding
Visitor Question: B2B Blogging on Your Company Site or Hosted Elsewhere
A friend just emailed me the following question:
As a Business to Business Company is it better to have your company blog hosted on the company website or should it be more indirect and hosted on wordpress or something like that.
I am getting conflicting answers from my people and was wondering if you had any advice.
The following is my response back. Hope this helps you as well.
In answer to your question about whether a B2B company should have their blog hosted on their website or on something external I'd look at the importance of the following:
- Branding
- Maintaining the technology
- Lock-in
- Reasons to not be on your main company site
Branding
To me, branding is the most important. If your blog is a key part of your communications strategy then you should have full control over all the elements that show up on the blog:
This is not to say you can't use a service hosted off your current servers. Just that the logo, design, content, domain, comments system, auto-emails, and even functionality should all reflect your brand. I recommend the blog be on your company's main domain. If it must be hosted somewhere else, then a sub domain can work. The key is that you do not dilute your brand across multiple domains.
Additionally there should be no third-party content that could show up on your blog without your direct control, such as advertising automatically shown by the blog network you may be hosted on.
