A corporate blog without writers

You hardly hear when web 2.0 initiatives didn't work for a company. Well, I might have found one.

The tour operator Thomson, part of the TUI group, did launch its blog Thomson Holidays Blog a while ago (probably in 2006 if I remember) but I haven't seen any new post since 2007.

The blog still exists but you can't find any old posts apart from some rather strange dull posts about the movie Ratatouille.

I would be interested to understand why this didn't work for the operator.

Comments

[Claude]

I see the same example with the eBookers blog in France.

It's not so easy to handle a good blog.

[Darren Cronian]

The main reason is that the content wasn't very useful to their targeted audiance, questions weren't being asked to generate user content, and the blog wasn't exactly promoted in a prime spot on the Thomson website.

For a tour operator the size of Thomson you have to ask yourself, what are the benefits for them to create a blog -- they aren't desperate for extra traffic, they have ok customer communication methods in place, but I think with some planning prior to it's launch, I think they could have made a success of it.

They are a growing number of travel corporate blogs but companies just don't understand blogging or can't be bothered putting the time and effort into it.

[Ross]

When a website has very firm marketing in place, on or offline, and a constant stream of traffic, a blog may not be worth the time it takes when weighing up what they're likely to get out of it.

Unless the blogger can produce genuinely interesting articles related to their company, then there's no use pretending as it will never garner a significant benefit.

[Darren Cronian]

I agree Ross, but for natural search results gaining one-way links to different pages on the site is important, and a blog would help with that. I suspect that most of the links pointing to Thomson would be their homepage. The blog would be a good way to get more longtail traffic and to deeper pages.

A blog in my opinion would suit a small - medium sized travel company who is competiting against larger travel companies. Like you say though, a company like Thomson has massives amounts of money where marketing is concerned, so it's small fry the extra traffic a blog would bring.