A case study of a good use of blogs in Corporate Communications and how we all care about Yogurt

In this Wired article about Blogon [via Robert], Six Apart and Microsoft, "The Empire Blogs Back", Anil talks about the 230 employee yogurt maker Stonfield Farm, which competes against dairy (French!) giant Dannon.

It is really interesting to see how they use blogs and Movable Type for their corporate communication, they opened a blogs section on their corporate home page to explain to people what it is and then they have five different types of weblogs:

The Dairy Planet that talks about how they try to nurture and sustain the environment
Strong Women Daily News which presents fitness and health tips to Women (they even have a Strong Women Summit)
The Bovine Bugle is a report directly from one of their farms and gives the inside story to all customers
The daily Scoop tells about everything happening in the company, in a funny way
Creating Healthy Kids gives updates on their Menu for Change healthy food in schools program

I used to run a Web Agency and I remember how difficult it was to find content and creative ideas for our consumer brands clients as usually their marketing is limited to heavy TV advertising, and on-line, you need content. Well, the way they use blogs there is just excellent and I guess could be a showcase for what could become many small businesses or well known brands dead corporate sites.

Of course, they commit to regular updates which they seem to be doing fine, involving many employees in the Company who blog themselves.