Blogs - Social Marketing for Business

With the emergence of a variety of social media tools and their increasingly recognizable impact on the corporate world, business owners like you are "socializing" online like never before. Blogs are perhaps the most commonly used social media tools, for their ease of use, deeply penetrating power and result monitoring capability. You can chant this new age communication mantra and spike up your marketing, public relations and customer relations effectiveness.

The transformation of office spaces from cabins to cubicles and heavy door board rooms to glass paneled meeting areas led to the importance of water cooler conversations and coffee station grapevine. CEOs started walking around the office to "catch the pulse" rather than summoning employees to their desks. The same changes are now more than apparent in the virtual world. Online communities speak their minds while organizations listen keenly and more importantly, react in order to better manage their image, productivity and profits. Business or commercial blogs are a simple, inexpensive, yet highly effective communication tool that can be used to achieve corporate goals to a significant extent.

Having a goal or a clearly defined objective, however, is the key. This is true for realizing success in any marketing technique. In the absence of a definite goal, the measurement of a blog’s success or even, creating a monitoring metrics becomes impossible. Even so, there are companies that will get a professional blogger to run their blog with the directive to "just keep it going; we need one because our competitors have one." Attempting to measure the results of such a blog based on the number of hits, trackbacks or user comments and posts does not yield much. Sadly, then, you find abandoned or stale blogs that mean nothing to anyone.

Here are some goals you could aim for in a business blog:

The top level goals link directly to performance, productivity, sales and profits:

• Inform and educate: It is undoubtedly, the Information Age we live in and the majority of users go online to search for information. You can use your company blog to provide customers with information on how to use your products. For example, MacroMedia - the software company provides a customer service blog for users and staff to share solutions in an organized fashion - http://feeds.adobe.com/.
• Build a community: Nothing sells better than word of mouth. You can get your happy, loyal customers talking, or blogging actually, to develop a community around your product or service. Leading research firm Jupiter Research has a blog for each of its analysts. Example: http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/analysts/schatsky/
• Promote products, special offers or new services: A blog is a great way to make an announcement about a new product or service or special promotional offer. It doesn’t even have to be on your own company blog. You can get a popular blog or blogger to promote your product and drive sales. Don’t be surprised to find online communities already talking about your product on a blog. Monitor this kind of consumer generated content feedback to add value to your product offering.
• Manage customer relations: Conversing with your customers via a blog is a powerful way to show them you care – listen to their comments, respond thoughtfully, appreciate their feedback and act upon their suggestions. The loyalty you gain from such online activity is not only immeasurable; it is sustainable and goes a long way.

At a deeper level, there are secondary, yet just as important goals that you can achieve:

• Enhance your corporate image: Conveying your corporate social responsibility initiatives, the company’s vision and long-term growth plans, or even managing a crisis situation can be done effectively via a blog.
• Employee relations: Your company blog can also have a private, log-in area for employees. This can be very effectively used for internal communications, training or even idea exchange and brainstorming. For example, imagine yourself in a situation where you have to name a new enterprise-wide system. Rather than call a staff meeting, you could make a blog post asking employees for their suggestions. Take another situation where you have to remind staff about a very important training session. A staff memo or employee newsletter in their email inbox may not be as effective as a quick reminder on the blog. An RSS (Really Simple Syndication!) feed will do the rest about making sure employees see the reminder when it's posted.
• Research and Development: Feedback, suggestions and comments on your blog can be a useful information tool aiding the research and development activities of an organization.
• Media Relations: Some companies fit corporate blogging into their PR plan to even include Media Relations as a blogging goal. Press releases, public announcements, senior management profiles, corporate fact sheets and every other useful media information document can be made available on a company blog.

These goals are only an indicative list while most business blogs would use a combination of these and/or more. As a business owner, you may be contemplating the interactivity of a blog. The simple insight for you is that whether or not you have a company blog, key stakeholders (customers, employees, shareholders and potential buyers) will talk about and learn about your company somewhere in the blogosphere. Having a presence in this space will show your willingness to openly interact, rather than remaining absent and conveying ignorance.