Are blogs marketers’ new e-tool? is an article by Jeff Zbar in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel that does a fair job of looking the benefits of business blogging. Zbar also shows that companies perceive blogging as a high-risk venture due to its uncontrollability:
Blogs scare some marketers, because they often welcome comments from their visitors, opening a two-way dialogue between writers and readers. The fear is that such open dialogue invites negative comments.
But that openness can yield frank consumer insights as well. And marketers can gather competitive intelligence by reading the blogs of their rivals.
There is so much insight to be gained from the above. Let’s take a look.
Outdated perceptions of marketing are attempting to use a new form of communications that is really designed to used by a different set of perceptions. Marketing, and in particular, advertising, were previously conceived of as, essentially, a kind of corporate propaganda.
Yes, I’m using that word on purpose: the attempt to inundate a target with a message and whose express intent is only to foster message acceptance is not communications, which is two-way, but is actually propaganda. Blogging and its commenting functionality is true communications. It’s two way. You can’t just shoot your message out there, then hide behind a wall of consumer hotline voice menu defenses. The Berlin Wall of provider/consumer relations has been razed. Now you are standing there face-to-face with your customer. You don’t talk at them, anymore. You talk to them and they talk to you. It’s a conversation. Markets are conversations.
As I’ve written previously, you may have to deal with negative comments. Blogs do not, as stated above, invite negative comments. Bad customer service and shoddy product quality invite negative comments. As I have also written before, blogs aren’t band-aids for badly run businesses. The two-way dialogue you create by having a blog, make no mistake, will change the way you do business. And well it should. The sooner you get your business act together and the sooner you start a blog, the sooner your business can begin this transformation before your competition.
Speaking of competition, gathering competitive intelligence from your rivals is an advantage, but probably not in the way you might think. If you beat your competitors on the draw and get your blog up and running before they do, you might fear they will use it against you and somehow get an unfair advantage over you in the marketplace. Not so. If you plan your blogging strategy right (oh, hell yes, there is a strategy to all this… helping you with it is what I do), all they will do is eat your dust as they scramble to catch up. You will have established yourself as a leader in your space and they will be responding to you.
If your competition’s blogging strategy and handling is inferior to yours, you can really jump on that. Say, for example, that a competitor establishes a blog shortly after you do. They do it because it’s the next big thing to do and it’s going to help with their “marketing” (propaganda, remember?). They fear comments and don’t have them. You allow comments. You win. People are going to believe in you; they’re going to see your competitor’s blog for what it is: a bunch of marketing messages no better than any other kind of advertising. You will be percieved as authentic, while they will be perceived as false. If they allow comments, but badly bungle handling them, again, you win. You have to be graceful about winning, though. Do not ever speak of your competition in anything but glowing terms.
New studies have just come out that indicate people who blog and read blogs are generally younger and wealthier than those who do not. By beating your competition to the punch, your blog has a chance to get these folks involved with you before they can get involved with your competitor. In other words, you can rapidly acheive major market penetration and significantly grow your customer base.
We really got a lot out that little quote, didn’t we? When thinking about blogs, you would do best to think about them from a blogger’s perspective, rather than from a more calcified marketer’s or PR person’s perspective. Blogging isn’t new rules, it’s a new game entirely.
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