Should Your Company Blog? No company must have a blog, but many companies should. Here’s why.
Christine Halvorson is the Senior Blog Strategist for search engine marketing company @Website Publicity www.websitepublicity.com. She transformed a successful, 25-year career as a writer into a career as a corporate blogger, one of the first in the country. In 2004, Chris pioneered the use of blog (web log) technology for Stonyfield Farm (http://www.stonyfield.com).
I am continually in awe at the things one can do on the Internet these days. Mere mortals without technical training can show the world their home videos. Regular people can have their own radio program. I can watch my granddaughter eat her first solid food in Minnesota, and take part in a son-in-law’s college graduation 2,000 miles away.
Blogging is the vehicle that’s been allowing us this dynamic, real-time contact with family and friends. And if businesses aren’t taking advantage of this new medium to build customer connections in the same way, they’re missing a huge opportunity.
A blog is one of the best tools at our disposal today for relationship building in a corporate setting. It’s the fastest and most versatile method of delivering each new tool--streaming video, audio podcasts, photos, interactive contests, and whatever is next around the bend--to their intended audience. These tools make a blog the place to tell your corporate story differently, and with a definite personal touch.
With a blog you can invite the customer in to talk to you, to contribute to your efforts in some way, to give you feedback or just see why you’re in the business you’re in.
In addition to seeking input, sending your corporate message out is easy with a blog. A blog can be your editorial column, your radio and television station, your daily newspaper. It is a way your business can, finally, own your message AND the media.
Blogging in the corporate world is only about four years old. (Tech companies have been at it a little longer than that.) Stonyfield Farm, the organic yogurt company, is where I got my start in corporate blogging back on blog launch day, April 1, 2004. Stonyfield led the way in corporate blogging, but now the number of businesses—large and
small—that have one or more blogs is nearly uncountable, and with good reason.
Companies that are successfully blogging are giving their own unique spin to it. They’re not copying the blog models set forth by political pundits or narcissistic teenagers. Companies that do blogging well avoid the mistakes they could easily make—using a blog as just one more place to convince you to buy, for example.
The folks at Southwest Airlines do a great job with their blog “Nuts About Southwest.” They use it to show us an insider’s view of the life of a pilot, or to talk about something as serious as their recent maintenance problems. That’s a good way to use a blog.
Some companies are using a blog to deliver the thoughts of their CEO, as is the case with “Nick’s Blog,” written by F. Nicholas Jacobs, president and CEO of Windber Research Institute and Windber Medical Center. Boring? Not really. Nick is up to his neck in the vagaries of our health care system. Why not see what he has to say?
Even the Los Angeles Police Department is using blogging as a tool that could only be described as a 24/7 press conference, complete with dire alerts when a criminal is on the loose.
All these blogs are about conversations, about letting the customer “in” in a real, substantive way, and sometimes in a fun and frivolous way, while achieving a closeness that can’t be delivered in traditional advertising and PR.
If you think a blog is another way for your company to sell, sell, sell, don’t go there. If you think it’s a place to toot your own horn for the sake of tooting, don’t go there. If you’re doing it because everybody else is doing it, don’t go there.
But, if you have something to say and if you have a great product with an interesting story, start blogging. If your product is very visual, you must begin blogging immediately. If your web team is over-taxed and it takes them months to get anything new up on your website, start a blog tomorrow. If nothing is moving on your website, your product is not going to move, either.
A blog increases one’s visibility on the web, organically and almost magically. Regular, consistent postings to a blog containing the right key words and phrases can make the company’s website extremely easy to find. It’s search engine marketing on steroids if done correctly.
“Social media” seems to be all the rage in the business press, fueled by the huge success of Facebook and MySpace. Should the corporate world forget blogs and go that direction? I don’t think so. A blog should be your first, and perhaps your only, foray into this strange new world of online relationship building. It can bring many of the benefits that social media sites might, without the creepy element of asking customers to “be your friend.” If you blog correctly, you’ll be making friends every day.
