Communicating with customers through blogs
Blogs can be used to convey news, events, plans, and customer support information to your customers and to engage them in dialogue that can be used to improve the way your company functions.
To find out what’s being said about you, simply search for your company name in a search engine, such as Google. In many cases, some of the top returns are blog posts of consumers who’ve expressed an opinion about your company or products.
Considering whether your company can benefit from a blog.
In the following sections, I discuss just how businesses are putting blogs to work for them to do a better job reaching and talking with customers, increasing interest in a company or product, setting themselves up as leaders in their industries, and more.
Entertainment industry magazine Variety uses an internal blog to keep staff informed of screenings, position changes, and the competition. The Have You Heard blog is just that — a clearinghouse for “around the water cooler” information sharing.
Any staff member can post to the blog or comment on other posts. Interestingly, Variety allows staff to post to the blog anonymously; this is not done to permit gossip, but to allow staff to make critical observations that might not ordinarily be exposed to the light of day.
Many early blogs focused on technology and the ubiquitous “this-is-my-life” blog produced by teens and adults; an intermediate wave focused on news, politics, and the Iraq conflict; more recently, the hottest blogs are business blogs. Why do businesses want to participate in a medium that is commonly perceived to be the stomping ground of narcissists, egomaniacs, and children?
Your company may already have a Web site. (It doesn’t? Put this book down, and get yourself a copy of Creating Web Pages For Dummies, 7th Edition, by Bud E. Smith and Arthur Bebak. I’ll see you in three months.) You may even have some great mechanisms in place for sharing company news or handling customer support. What makes what you’re already doing different from a blog? Three words: writing, updating, and dialogue.