Blog for Business: Is It Right for Your Company?
by Barbara Payne
If you haven’t yet looked at blogging as
a potential marketing tool for your business, now’s the
time.
Last spring, I wrote to all my customers to suggest
that it was time for them to start letting at least their salespeople
write blogs for their customers and prospects. It sounds radical
to many managers, but there’s no denying the power of authentic
communication when it comes to building loyalty between people—and
clearly your customers are people first.
Let’s evaluate this idea using the PPC technique
(Pluses, Potentials and Concerns), as described in Roger L. Firestein’s
Leading on the Creative Edge.
Idea: Let Your Customers Read Blogs Written
By Your Salespeople
Pluses
Customers will feel special (always a good thing).
Customers will learn about your company in an
authentic voice from the people whose main concern is helping
your company make money (so they can make money)—not a bad
motivation for creating positive content.
Salespeople enjoy the process and feel good about
being able to be in touch with customers more frequently.
Potentials
Your customers are so in touch with you that they
think of you instantly when a colleague needs a referral for your
product or service.
Your customers feel so attached to you (through
your sales reps) that they don’t hesitate to share important
information about developments in their own company—which
means you can become proactive (perhaps way ahead of the competition)
about responding to their needs.
Your customers become even more excited about
your R&D process and are more willing to help test new products/services.
Your customers complain less because they really
know and trust your processes and are more inclined to be understanding
about any glitches in service or problems with products.
Concerns
How might you control any tendency for salespeople
to write content that might appear negative?
How might you let go of any fear that someone
will say too much?
What review process might you institute so that
trade secrets and other intellectual property items are protected—clearly
understood as off-limits for blog content?
Remember… your salespeople are out there
with your customers every day—in their offices and plants
and at conferences and in hotels. You have even less control over
what they say in those situations than you do in a blog, so think
trust.
It Works
A recent Harvard Business Review article recounted
how the CEO of a midsize corporation stood up at a big company
meeting to introduce a new product they’d developed, only
to find that most of the audience already knew about it.
Why?
Because they’d been reading the blog of
one of the company’s junior associates—who chronicled
the progress of the development. Not surprisingly, HBR heralded
this as a wakeup call to corporate marketing folks.
The effectiveness of blogging as a marketing tool
is no longer in doubt. In addition to all the advantages of a
newsletter, it has the added power of the fact that people choose
to come to it and read it.
More than three billion blog pages are indexed
on the Google search engine, yet people will find yours if it’s
a topic of interest. What’s more, they’ll pass the
word to others! That’s virtually free promotion and the
kind of unsolicited third-party endorsements every business owner
dreams of.
Calculate the potential gain—both to your
company and to your customers—against the potential risks.
Be creative about ways to minimize or eliminate perceived risks.
Once you’ve developed confidence in the
power of sales blogging and are comfortable with the process your
people follow, don’t hesitate to expand your target audiences
to include vendors, trade and business editors and all prospects.
It’s free to start. Try services like www.bloghosts.com,
www.blog-city.com, or www.blogspot.com. There are many choices.
Or you can set one up on your own server with CGI scripts.
No matter what size your business, this new Internet
tool is a mighty one. Don’t waste any more time.
Barbara Payne is managing principal of ReallyGoodFreelanceWriter.com.
Read her blog at http://www.reallygoodfreelancewriter.com/getmorecustomers
