POLITICAL BLOGS
Political blogs have been in the news for the past couple of years, and it’s pretty clear that candidates who keep a blog are hoping to convince people to take a specific action: Voting for the blogger. Blogs can definitely be used to drive people toward taking an action, but you need to use a delicate hand.
For instance, don’t expect to start a blog in order to sell more units of your latest gizmo by blogging about how great the gizmo is. The public has seen a lot of ads, and they have no reason to seek out more. Start a blog that helps current owners of the gizmo do more and better things with it, though, and you get your current customers to talk about how they’re using the product and how great it is. The result is likely to be more purchases, plus your company gets credit for caring about the consumers of its product.
� Encourage dialogue with current and potential customers.
Another great use for a blog is to start an ongoing dialogue with your customers. After all, your customers are the people who know your products and services best, and they have definite opinions about how you can improve what you’re doing. A blog can elicit this kind of feedback with huge efficiency and more inexpensively than user surveys and focus group testing.
Most business blogs combine several of these purposes into one blog, but don’t fall into the trap of trying to do everything at once. For instance, don’t combine customer service with an information exchange blog. The two approaches dilute rather than strengthen each other. A humorous customer service blog, on the other hand, might serve the joint purpose of helping customers and entertaining them during what is ordinarily not a fun process.
If you do have several purposes in mind, consider starting several blogs. Users understand that each blog is a different conversation and gravitate toward the one that serves them best. Be sure to keep your end of the conversation similarly segregated, however, or you dilute the effectiveness of what you’re doing yourself.
After you define a goal for your blog — or perhaps several goals — you need to set the stage for success by putting the resources in place for a good blog. Each of the following elements contributes to the overall success of your blog and should be planned carefully before you launch the blog into the world. Because whoever writes your blog is speaking on behalf of your company, they need to be reliable, conscientious, accurate, and trustworthy. Besides that, you need to find a blogger that is thoroughly knowledgeable about the subject of the blog — and who is genuinely interested in passing that information on.
Keep in mind that a marketing professional, though trained to convey corporate messages and communicate with the public, may be a bad choice. Their very expertise can work against them; in the eyes of the public, they’re “marketing shills” and not to be trusted. It’s unkind but something to consider when choosing a blogger.