THE BLOG AS INTERACTION WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS
A blogger is your company’s Web interface with the public, someone who represents you to readers, conveys new information, makes amends for company mistakes, and generally makes the company more approachable and friendly. Your blogger may serve the role of ombudsman, translating customer needs to the company and rephrasing company positions for the public. Or your blogger might serve a more traditional marketing purpose by letting people know about upcoming events, changes in structure, new ventures, and so on. If your blogger manages this task with humor and flair, this normally dry task becomes a way to establish rapport.
What this really means is that a traditional marketing person is almost definitely not who should be writing your blog. Ideally, it’s the company’s CEO or someone within the company with real knowledge and expertise who can speak with authority and answer specific questions — maybe even a technician or an engineer.
If the blog is designed to help people use your service or just better under¬stand it, you might be looking for someone who normally handles customer support or someone who is involved in the day-to-day maintenance of the system. In almost every case, you’re looking for a blogger whose everyday job is “doing” rather than managing or communicating. Wouldn’t you love to have a direct line of communication with someone influential at say, your phone company, rather than talking to a customer service person with no real authority and who perhaps is only peripherally connected to the company?
One of the scariest aspects of starting a company blog can be the lack of control over the final message. Even at companies where a blogger’s entries are edited before they’re posted, the resulting presentation is much more informal than the communication most companies have with the public. This informality is what makes the medium so appealing to readers, so don’t succumb to the conservative voice in your head that’s thinking, “Well, I’ll just run these posts through a blogging committee with a representative from sales, legal, and marketing before I put them online.” Nothing kills the spontaneity and genuine feel of a blog faster than giving editing power to a committee.
Use a light hand when editing comments on your blog. Edit for factual accuracy, spelling, and style consistency, but leave in the color that gives your blogger a unique voice and that conveys his or her enthusiasm. Having concerns about propriety of the content is natural, so work with your blogger to establish a set of guidelines for what kinds of material are acceptable for the blog. Take care, also, in choosing your blogger in the first place. If you can’t trust the person writing the blog, there’s little point in creating it in the first place.