Recently we talked about why customers want you to blog. Still, blogs take time and effort, so a company is quite justified in asking, "What's in it for us?" The answer is--plenty.
1. Stronger customer relationships. Increasingly, customers are skeptical of ad-speak and legalese. Increasingly, customers want to engage in dialog, not listen to a monolog. Blogs are an ideal medium to cultivate open, genuine, two-way conversations.
2. New business through search engine optimization. To boost organic search performance, there's nothing like a blog. Search engines favor them because of all the fresh content, links, and keyword phrases. With the immense popularity of online search and the development of powerful new local search tools, online visiblity is crucial. Relying on paid search alone is an incomplete strategy--many people will click on a high ranked page well ahead of an advertised site.
3. New product rollouts. Sometimes, a blog serves a very specific purpose. A new product launch is a time when a company needs to do a lot of explaining and a lot of listening. Since a blog collects all company posts and customer comments in one place, management can look there to assess market acceptance and discover unforseen problems.
4. Ongoing product support. Often, a blog can be more effective than a help desk or FAQ page. Microsoft, for instance, lists 1239 community blogs that provide customer assistance on their many technologies.
5. Crisis management. There is a now famous story from 2004 about Kryptonite, a lock company that responded slowly to a blog story that showed how one of their locks could be picked with a Bic pen. The story spread like wildfire through the blogosphere and did considerable damage to Kryptonite's image (and bottom line), at least for awhile. Traditional methods of public relations--such as print press releases--are too slow and awkward for today's Web environment. Blogs give companies a way to reach customers quickly when every second counts.
6. Save money. In some situations, blogs reduce costs in other areas. As noted earlier, a blog might provide product support more effectively than a telephone help desk or FAQ pages that require frequent updating. Since blogs require little (if any) programming expertise to update and manage, internal IT support is far less than what a traditional Web site demands. In fact, for smaller companies and start-ups, a blog can serve entirely as the corporate Web site. Blogs might also replace or reduce the need for other types of PR activity, direct mail programs, and newsletters.
Visit our Perspectives page for more about blogs and search engine marketing.
