Social Media Mavens / Experts

It is becoming more and more important for corporations - as well as businesses of all sizes - to have a blog in today’s world where so many people own computers. But if your business has put off starting a blog for far too long, here is why you should really be blogging, and how it can be advantageous to your overall business marketing strategy.

Human face
You don’t really want people to think of your company as “big box” or “typical corporate America”. And blogging can actually put a human face to your company, since the company now has a voice it can relate to when it reads your blog. When you consider how much money companies put into creating a human face for their business, doing it with a company blog is a relatively inexpensive way to humanize your corporation.

Controlling the message
Public Relations tends to want to run far, far away from blogs. But now, more are embracing blogs as a way to control the company’s message and how they release it. You can now have a fireside chat with your company’s CEO in the format of a blog interview, where responses can be monitored. If there is a scandal or other negative publicity surrounding your company, you already have a platform ready to release information that doesn’t involve sending press releases to the media or subjecting your CEO or other employees to a press conference.

Excitement and anticipation
Companies can easily use a blog to give hints and tidbits about new product releases or services well before the actual launch so you can get people excited about what you are going to announce before you did it. Since press releases are rarely sent to announce something your company hasn’t done yet, a blog is an easy way to get the word out and build anticipation.

Fresh content
Having a blog adds new fresh original content to your site every time the blog is updated. And since this is something many corporate sites struggle with, it means you can add quality content as often as you like.

Soft selling
Now, you don’t want to do a hard sell in your company blog, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with soft selling products or services in a blog… in fact, many readers will expect it. Just don’t go overboard with every post being promotional in nature. But it can be a great way to market your products, particularly ones that people might not be as familiar with, whether lower sellers or simply new to the market.

Reminding
When you have people subscribed to your company blog, those are all people who will think of your company as a household name or brand everytime you post a new blog entry. And since blogging is such a low-cost marketing strategy compared to paid advertising, you are saving money to place your identity in front of people.

For all these reasons, corporate blogs are becoming more and more popular for companies. As long as you are approaching your blog in the right way, it can be an invaluable marketing tool.

As I mentioned, social media should not be about the hard sell but about outreach: creating a means for customers to interact with you in as simple a way as possible. A typical example happened to me earlier.

I have been thinking about the possibility of an audio or video element to the blog for a while and felt that Utterz may be the way to go to see if either format worked for me. I duly created an account then called the UK Utterz phone number to record a test that would get automatically posted over to the blog.

I recorded a short piece of audio but on playing it back found that it was virtually incomprehensible - it sounded as though it had been re-sampled, shrinking the length and raising the pitch - a chipmunk with a stutter. Needless to say I deleted the item.

I imagined that it would have been a temporary glitch but, just in case Utterz was having an issue, I posted a message on Twitter asking if anyone had been experiencing problems.

A couple of hours later I received a reply from @chrishanaka who works in a customer service capacity at Utterz asking that I contact him so he could look into the problem. I mailed him the details and then received a response advising me that an engineer had dug the recording out of the trash and was looking at what could have happened.

How’s that for service?

Without even having to approach Utterz directly they have been actively monitoring their brand online and have a presence in place to deal with this type of issue. Any company that deals with the public should be heading towards this type of model and converting a negative experience into a positive one.

For every business taking such a proactive approach there will be the competition struggling to build their reputation because they do not take this type of action. Some companies have to a degree been doing this for years by having ‘unofficial’ representatives hanging around forums that relate to their products but offering customer support using social media as an official channel is exactly the way things should be moving.

Thank you Chris and thank you Utterz.