30 Brilliant Corporate Blogs To Take Inspiration From

As more and more companies and businesses try to promote their brands online, a unique presence is needed to expand your company and bring it to a wider audience. As a way of communicating your brand to a new audience, a wide number of companies use blogs to promote and engage with them. While many use it as free advertising, the most popular companies make it more than just self-promotion, offering tips, advice and thoughts that will help and benefit their readers and make them want to come back.

Starting a blog and making it interesting isn’t the easiest task but we’ve compiled a list of 30 different companies and their blogs for you to read and will help you in shaping your blog and giving it a voice. Some you’ll already know, some you may not but reading through them will definitely give you a couple of idea for your own blog.

There’s a good mixture of companies listed below from the usual suspects relating to social media to others such as fashion, cuisine and hotels. Such blogs don’t have to be exquisitely designed (although it does help) but remember that every blog, including the ones listed below, had to start somewhere and that creating a community takes time. Flickr:
Focusing on building its community by featuring select photos from its users.

Disqus:
Gives an unique insight into the company’s philosophy and workings alongside giving their readers information and access to preview versions of their software before they’re made available to non-readers.

Google:
Insight into how the company works and new releases, style of writing is informal which allows their announcements to speak for themselves.

Evernote:
Well designed, simple and makes great use of multimedia tools such as images, podcasts etc in shaping their posts.

Lulu:
Regularly updated with hints, tips and useful information that show its readers how to get the most out of its services.Ebay:
Bright cheerful and a personable writing style while successfully amalgamating social media aspects into the blog.

BBC:
The Editors blog on the BBC News website gives a fascinating insight as to how the newsroom is always changing.

Marriott International:
CEO Bill Marriott uses the blog to voice his thoughts and opinions on a wide variety of things that’s related to being a hotelier. Although he sometimes strays away from it, his personal touch allows him to communicate with his audience, mainly the company’s customers and shareholders.

Amazon Web Services:
Amazon’s blog is interesting as it takes a usually boring subject matter (data processing and storages services) and makes it read like a fan blog. The enthusiasm of the writers comes through making it a fascinating read.

Zillow:
While a blog about real-estate, Zillow keep things interesting with a number of advice articles and celebrity related stories to keep things ticking.Playstation:
A great example as to how getting readers and fans involved through comments and opinions can help grow your blog.

Dell:
While they have seven different blogs, Dell’s site is a great example as to how you can use a landing page to link up separate blogs together.

GM FastLane:
A great example about how the main focus should always be the company’s speciality. Here GM FastLane talk about cars and only cars.

Adaptive Path:
Thoughtful and interesting pieces from the San Francisco design firm.

Lijit:
Blogging and offering useful tips focusing on business, economics, analysis and design.Starbucks:
Makes the customers at the centre of the experience allowing them to submit ideas for things such as new drinks, food items and store designs. They usually blog about the ideas where readers can rate and comment.

Twitter:
Informal and regularly updated meaning that you can keep up to date with any changes with the service.

37signals:
Instead of blogging about their products which they do in a separate blog, 37signals share advice and insights into business, editing, design and other topics of interest, sometimes featuring other products and services on the blog.

Southwest Airlines:
Southwest Airlines’ blog is named ‘Nuts About Southwest’ which implies that it doesn’t take itself too seriously, instead blogging about itself and the airline industry with a personal touch and regular use of videos for certain posts.

Adobe:
Featuring a massive collection of fun and interesting blogs from Adobe employee from around the world. By letting their employees blog about the company, it means that many post tutorials, reviews, advice relating to Adobe.Freshbooks:
Similar to 37signals, Freshbooks use their blog to share advice and insights about how they work through a clean interface.

Oracle Apps Lab:
Featuring fun and interesting discussions on web 2.0 in the business.

Dreamhost:
Making it one of the most personal corporate blogs through publishing behind the scenes photos and personal stories. Yet does it in a friendly way that allows you to get to know those behind the company as well as having fun and humorous topics to read about.

Manpower:
When Manpower asked their visitors what information they wanted to read most, the most popular answer was employment law. Therefore the Manpower blog writes about this subject to help their readers.

Wegman’s:
This company has attracted a loyal and engaged audience through posts through their president Danny Wegman and other store employees through fun ideas for recipes and nutrition.
Patagonia:A entertaining blog that deals with adventuring and outdoor activities. All their posts feature reader stories about their adventures and can be an absorbing read.

Fiskars:
Creating an amusing blog for a company that makes scissors sounds like a difficult task but Fiskars have developed a creative blog about crafting and being creative. It also helps that all the writers are passionate about what they’re writing about.

Arvixe:
While not the most aesthetically pleasing blog to look, Arvixe’s blog hosts a wide range of tutorials and how-to articles for the various tools and services they provide. A wide range of beginner and experts tutorials are available to everyone, regular and new readers, and is updated regularly making it an incredibly useful blog.

Accenture:
While made up of sixteen different blogs which are all interesting in their own right, consulting firm Accenture have gotten their brightest employees to write about topics relating to business, technology, consulting, security and communications.

Whole Story:
Similar to Starbucks offering how-to’s pieces, interesting feature articles and product ideas.