Carnival Blog: Or I should have said “How to do a corporate blog, the right way”? The Carnival Blog, written by John and Heidi Heald (Carnival Cruise Director) is actually a lot of fun to read. It is very personal, very personable and reeks of the enthusiasm and the “fun times” that can be had aboard a Carnival Cruise Ship . The fun fact about this blog is that not only is it down to earth and chock full of John’s idiosyncrasies which make it a delicious read, it is also doing amazingly well in terms of traffic, readership and participation. The blog has attracted 600,000 visitors since its inception in March and continues to lead the WordPress.com viewer charts. Now in all fairness, I cannot see Michael Dell write about his trip to the local Sonoma winery in broken English, but the $64,000 trick is to engage your clientèle and prospects into thinking more about your company and what you have to offer and keep them from thinking about the competition.
Kind of peculiar that a large company like Carnival would use WordPress.com for their blog rather than hosting it on their own domain. Is that a common practice? Definitely a good blog, though.
I have my own hosting where I use WordPress, but I also run 2 blogs (well, the occasional post) on WordPress.com, since… it’s extremely easy to set up new blogs. They can be ones with names and topics unrelated to your own hosting. Sometimes I wonder if hosting under a subdomain (to save on registering a new domain) affects how people view the content… Not sure about others, but when I see a blog under a subdomain that interests me, I tend also to visit the main one, and that almost always affects how I view the blog.
Back to the topic: Thanks for recommending the blog, Mark Ghosh 🙂 I’ll add it to my list of ‘fun-reads’!