Let’s close this week’s blogging with five of my favorite blog posts I’ve collated over time; two on corporate blogging and three on community marketing. Here goes:

2 posts on Corporate Blogging

1. Should Steve Jobs blog?

A fascinating thought convincingly established by Arik Hesseldahl of Business Week. While some commenters believe Steve already has a plethora of delivery platforms to choose from, my personal belief is that his blogging will definitely be a great way for Steve to connect with his audience in the most authentic and honest manner possible.

It will also be a great way for Apple to counter some negative perception of being arrogant, given their recent trail of phenomenal success. And boy, what a great example, we blog enthusiasts would have to persuade our peers to start blogging. If Steve can, you can too.

2. Dell: Look who’s not talking now

Business 2.0’s ever aggressive blogger Owen Thomas, who’s been getting a lot of TechMeme face time recently, throws down the gauntlet:

It’s disappointing to revisit our story from three years ago and realize we got it wrong. We did note that Dell’s business model was about to face “its biggest challenge.” What we didn’t realize was that Michael Dell and Kevin Rollins weren’t up to it.

Would this be a good reason for Dell to use their corporate blog to respond to criticism?

3 Posts on Community Marketing

1. 5 New Jobs of the Web 2.0 generation:

Web Worker Daily, one of my favorite blogs talks about the 5 New jobs for a web-worker. I’d my fingers crossed as I read through the five, all the while thinking “there’s gotta be something on community”, and voila, I give you the “community curator”:

The final entrepreneurship example is to build a community. Sites like Ning.com simply the software setup for your social network. All that’s left is creating a site that’s sticky; a place where what’s shared is valuable and worth coming back to again and again.

I’ll definitely agree with Matthew that this would be a tough, challenging, yet extremely rewarding job. If you’ve a product or a service used by millions of users, there definitely ought to be communities built around it, and web 2.0 is only making it easier.

2. Can Social networks drive traffic?

Heather Hopkins (Director, Research – Hitwise UK) shows how targeted community campaigns utilizing social networks such as MySpace doubles web traffic to relevant shopping websites. And here’s the example to showcase that.

3. Difference between viral marketing and community marketing

A great post that shows the major difference between a viral marketing campaign and community marketing campaign (via The Daily Graze) through Alexa graphs. Here’s a teaser:

Viral Marketing graph (EepyBird):

Community Marketing graph (Wikipedia):

Hope that’ll keep you going for the rest of the weekend. Read the entire post here.
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I’ll be back with more on Monday. Have a great weekend!

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