The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil (Penguin Portfolio); available on Amazon

In writing the chapter called "What Your Organization Could Do With a Blog" I’ve rounded up all the usual suspects. A partial list:

• Blogging as a complement to (or replacement for) traditional PR
• Blogs as the new corporate Web site
• Blogs and microbrands (thanks to Hugh Macleod)

I queried some blogging colleagues on their ideas for "categories" of business blogging. True to bloggy form, the conversation immediately veered off into a spirited discussion of why putting blogs into categories is a bad idea because a blog is just a publishing tool or content management system, etc. Dave Taylor sums it up here.

Despite the detour into "just content management," I’m packaging up the chapter as "ways you could use a blog." Being specific and showing examples of the kinds of things other companies are doing is awfully helpful to most folks. (Of course the book also explains how a blog IS in fact a simple content management system.)

Oh, and a new (or new twist) category of blogs emerged this week: blogging to create a viral marketing campaign. Budget Rent A Car has launched Up Your Budget. It’s an entirely blog-based, four-week, 16-city campaign with $160,000 in prizes…

Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void provided the cool, animated cartoons that illustrate the blog.

You have to dig around in Up Your Budget
to figure it out. It’s really quite involved. You register to play the
game. Then follow video clues to figure out which cities are being
featured. The goal is to find an actual sticker in a public place, call
the number on it AND submit a video or photo as proof. To win $10K!

The
Budget logo appears discretely only in the lower right-hand corner of
the blog. Will be interesting to see how this one plays out. Oh and
Komra Moriko of Design4Results designed the blog. She also designed  debbieweil.com.