// July 18th, 2009 // Comments // Communication, Writing
I just signed up for the beta of business advice community Bizmore and wanted to contribute something to help them get started. Someone else had asked, “Should our company have a blog?” I’ve answered that many times in person, but I’ve never written about it. It’s a difficult topic to write about without coming across like shallow self-promotion, and the interweb does NOT need any more shallow self-promotion. But when I finished, I realised maybe I’d made a few conclusions you won’t read elsewhere. See if you agree…
Whether it’s worth having a company blog will depend a great deal upon who your ‘community’ is (your existing customers, potential customers, media, analysts, investors, employees) are. If you think nobody in your community would read a company blog, there’s little point investing the time and money.
These days, that’s unlikely. That diverse community of businesses and individuals your company relates to is turning away from traditional marketing and media, reaching to the web to research prior to purchase, as a means of understanding more about your company culture and how it is different from your competitors, and as a way of building a relationship with you and your business.
That’s right, a relationship. Don’t think anybody wants to have a relationship with your business? Wrong. Humans are are social species, and we feel better about a purchasing decision when we feel like we know who we’re buying from as well as what we’re buying. We always want a relationship with the person or organisation we’re buying from. Don’t believe me? Then why do we hate it so much when we get treated like that relationship doesn’t matter: like a number, not a person, like our years of brand loyalty don’t matter? It’s true of every commercial transaction and every kind of business, big and small.
That’s why corporations have executives schmoozing customers in corporate boxes and small corner stores have friendly counter staff who remember your name and how you like your coffee.
Most businesses have too many customers to know each of them in detail, to respond to their individual needs immediately, especially 24×7. So we can compensate for that by making sure there is enough personal relationship material available on a company blog. We can help a customer get to know us better while they wait for us to relate to them in real-time.
Blogs can be for press information, product announcements, staff motivation and a million other things. But the unique, irreplaceable benefit that a blog provides over any other means of marketing is that it allows a customer to build a relationship with us, on their own time and on their own terms.
Think about how bad your marriage would be if the only way you and your partner communicated was via press release, direct mail, ad banner or sales call to each other. It’s a wonder that customers felt any loyalty at all towards brands before blogs came along!
So where do you start? Unfortunately, blogging doesn’t come naturally to most businesspeople, it is difficult to do well, and businesses are still learning how to do it successfully. Most of the success stories out there started with an accidental discovery of something that worked rather than a proven strategy executed by someone who majored in Successful Business Blogging at college. I count myself as someone who’s been lucky enough to learn a few useful things along the way but nobody — including me — has all the answers yet. There’s not yet a business blogging profession to turn to, whatever the pro bloggers would have you believe. We’re just a bunch of people learning as fast as we can.
But there’s a silver lining to that cloud: while the industry is still new, consumer expectations are still low — nobody’s going to hate you for making some mistakes at first. You still have time to learn by experimentation and develop your own hard-won experience of what works and doesn’t work. Before you go, some tips to get you off to a good start:
- Find a professional to work with you or one of your staff as a mentor.
- Work hard on measuring what elicits a response from readers and whether it influences perception of you and your brand. There are web platform tools for this.
- Get into the rhythm of doing it regularly by setting a schedule and finding something to write about when a blog post is due, not when you think of something to write.
- Focus on making it second nature to share every new development in your business with your customers.
- Remember that once it’s been blogged, it never truly goes away. But also remember that admitting you made a mistake and rectifying it publicly builds a deeper relationship with your customer than you’d have if you never blogged at all.
