How Corporate Blogging Can Impact Your Media Relations Strategies
Sunday, October 26th, 2008Blogging has quickly migrated from being perceived as a forum for personal rants and raves to being a strategy-leading vehicle for communication between companies and their customers. Blogs are now the places to go to get fresh, un-”spun” information about industry trends, new technologies, and cutting-edge implementations. And blogs are the place to engage in genuine dialog about customer needs and expectations, company capabilities and responses to problems, and the technological capacities and decision-making that will shape society’s future.
So, why should you and your company “blog”?
- Blogging is informal and conversational. It gets beyond marketing hype and formula-driven communication.
- Blogging is two-way or many-way. It creates a level playing field for technology users, management, developers, salespersons, corporate leadership, and anyone else who wishes to weigh-in.
- Blogging creates a melting pot for ideas, implementations, applications, and discoveries.
- Blogging respects your customers, invites them to provide feedback and input, and engages them in future-casting and decision-making.
- Blogging empowers employees. It helps them create products customers want and solve problems customers have. By blogging, employees can help shape a positive image for the company and its products and present the human face and contact customers crave.
- Blogging may not be free, from a corporate perspective, but it is a low-cost way to develop an entirely new, fresh, effective marketing, communication, and support channel using existing resources.
- By blogging, you are speaking the language of the most influential industry analysts active today. Savvy customers read savvy analysts’ blogs. And savvy analysts pay attention to the blogs of savvy industry technology leaders.
- Blogging is immediate, provocative, reactive, responsive, and dynamic. It’s what’s happening now.
- Industry weeklies and magazines bring you old news. If it’s important, it’s in a blog today. Isn’t that where your news should be?
- Blog let you be “found” by journalists, analysts, and of course, other bloggers. I have seen time and time again where clients that I cover on my blog, or clients who have their own blogs get better rankings, get better media coverage, and are seen as current and authoritative sources on industry specific subjects.
Why? Because of tagging. If you tag right, you tag often, and write quality content that helps the media, you’ll be found and you’ll get coverage.
As you regularly revisit and update your company’s communication plan, be sure blogging is in the mix. Make it an integral part of your own corporate culture. And be certain that thought leaders in your industry sector understand your company, your products, and your technology vision from the points of view of your customers, your employees, and yourself…through blogs.
Alan Weinkrantz runs a local public relations firm. He blogs about his business at weinkrantz.com and AT&T’s three-screen consumer strategy at 3Screens.net.
Great post, Alan. You touched on being ‘found’; however, I don’t think you paid it as much attention as it should get. Blogs are really a reflection of what Search Engines want: targeted content, recency, and frequency. Search engines want to provide relevant results to users and blogs supply that more often than web sites do. With over half of your visitors coming via Search, blogs are fantastic for customer acquisition at a fraction of the cost of pay-per-click and other mass advertising methods.
The wonderful thing about running a blog is that it is loosely based and extremely casual.You have the ability to be far more conversational than professional with those who are posting with you.But at the same time, this does not mean you can slack off and present poor content.It is up to you to present a topic that has not been touched on that much or is fresh in the news.This entails you researching in forums and on the news for hot topics and anything related to your niche.
yes, blog has big power and influence on people, when i started to blog about things that our company does, we are growing as business much faster, because we got to know our clients better from the blogging. they tought us what we were doing wrong and we fixed it very fast. The clients were happy and of course our team also, i realy love blogging, and the post is good, just reminded me one book “talk worth than money”
Corporate blogging is imperative, especially if your business is in the communications field. Due to the fact that social media marketing is on the rise, showing your clients and fellow PR professionals that you understand the level of importance that social media holds in creating brand awareness and image, can definitely give you the upper hand. Not only do you have the ability to share with others what your business is all about, but you also have the opportunity to distinguish your company from others and thus attain clients who want a representative that is up on the current and most popular means of communication; social media marketing.
Corporate blogging also allows for companies to be more conversational when communicating with others in the profession, or potential clients. It is an extremely effective way of utilizing the ever-changing technologies that are making reaching clients more efficient and fun. Media Relations, Inc., a Minneapolis-based publicity company, has utilized corporate blogging on their website http://www.publicity.com, and has taken social media marketing to a whole new level by blogging on behalf of their clients, bringing attention to their product or service. To learn more, visit http://www.publicity.com.
[...] Blog Catalog, one of the most active social networks for blogs, has this to say in a 10/26/08 post: [...]
I,m using the social midia for my Business Social Networking, i hope to get some good contact with all my Friends on facebook myspace uoha.com and linkedin , I hope thats a good way to do Business Social Networking!