• Marketing Mag Website

  • Marketing Around The Table

QUESTION: What is the reality of maintaining a corporate blog and is it a valid marketing tool?

1

Martyn Thomas

Head of FRANk Media

Any manifestation of a brand should be regarded as a marketing opportunity both internally and externally, whether it is the receptionist, a TVC or a blog. Blogs continue to polarise opinion in Australia, as people ‘get it’ or simply don’t. I’d say for the moment the majority don’t get it.

Blogs are about engaging brand communities, creating brand advocates, customer service, word of mouth, adding value and differentiation – not about creating revenue. This in itself is an anathema to some corporations.

Having said this how often have you seen as marketing objectives the desire to create a sustainable point of difference, drive brand advocacy and create word of mouth?

According to technorati the top 15 corporate blogs include GM, Boeing, Dell, Kodak and Monster. General Motors blog (http://fastlane.gmblogs.com), for example, is socially ‘sticky’ with Twitter, YouTube and other social media applications. One glance at this and you’ll appreciate the dedicated energy and resource needed to maintain a blog – a blog is a commitment.

It will soon be expected that every company will have a media platform where it shares what it cares about with the world… the word blog will become irrelevant.

We like to think we ‘get it’ and feed our business and socially-focused missives as often as possible in a tone and manner that reflects us – positive, progressive, informative, sharing, observational and rewarding.

Maintaining a blog need not be arduous, but you do need to empower a person or people to ‘frame’ their thinking and contribute.

What are you waiting for?

2

Tony Hsieh

CEO, Zappos.com

Our belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff – like great customer service, building a great long-term brand, or passionate employees and customers – will happen naturally on its own.

We believe that your company’s culture and brand are really just two sides of the same coin. The brand may lag the culture at first, but eventually it will catch up.

We try to showcase our own company’s culture in as many ways as possible. We’ve found that blogs have been a great way to do so, because we include photos, videos and interviews with a lot of our employees. We don’t use our blogs as a direct marketing tool – it’s more of a branding and relationship-building tool.

As customers subscribe to our blogs, over time they get to learn what our culture is like. When they make a purchase from Zappos, they are no longer buying from a faceless corporation. They know they are supporting an organisation that has a fun culture, full of real people striving to deliver the best customer service possible.

The most important things to keep in mind when maintaining a corporate blog are to be authentic and transparent. A blog should not be a place to fill with press releases or marketing material. It should be a place that feels real to the readers, because customers are very good at sensing unauthenticity.

Ultimately, it will require that the company’s culture itself embraces these elements, or else it won’t work.

3

Matthew Cashmore

Innovation ecosystem manager, Lonely Planet

Blogging is wonderful. It doesn’t matter if you’re maintaining a list of things that your company finds interesting, or if you Tweet the intimate details of every piece of development you undertake – every interaction is valuable.

We increasingly live in a connected world, so if your customer can’t interact with you immediately you stand no chance of converting a massive segment of your audience.

Corporate blogs are sometimes no more than sales sheets and unless you enter into many-way conversations with your audience, you’re going to be left behind. We are fortunate that Lonely Planet has a vibrant community and one that is quite used to talking to us through our forums and a mass of other methods – but using a blog to broadcast what you’re doing can be very handy, for no other reason than allowing people to ‘see’ what’s coming next.

A genuine connection can be made with an audience if you’re willing to engage on their platform. That means writing with a degree of humanity and personality, and responding honestly to comments and questions.

The worst thing you can do is ignore a comment or dismiss a question by sending them to your formal website.

Generating that personal connection that a blog allows can provide a moment of delight for that customer, which then grows into a sustained relationship and love of brand that five years of advertising budget will never achieve.

It may be one-to-one, but, over time and via their own connections, that brand love will spread and grow online – your blog nurtures that expression of love and supports its growth.

4

Richard Lord

CMO, Hyro Limited

A corporate blog communicates thought leadership, provides value to important relationships and showcases the talent within an organisation. In return we seek feedback, communication and ideas from our stakeholders.

There are practical issues and important policy decisions to be considered – the first big question is ‘who gets to blog?’

We offer blogging as a privilege to recommended individuals from across the business, with a variety of skills and experience. The result is diverse perspectives, important for the credibility and usefulness of our blog. 

We communicate our corporate blogging policy on the intranet: it is clear, uses simple language and is enforced. It considers topics such as acceptable blogging, confidentiality and the obligations of the blogger. 

We do not moderate our bloggers’ posts as we have a team of intelligent professionals and trust them to respect our blog. This has been successful – they deliver good quality, well-thought out content.

Finally, you must commit to maintaining your blog. Contributions add positively to our bloggers’ performance incentives and this encourages participation. Without this, blogs will remain dormant.

Blogging is a valid marketing activity because it shows that a company has something to say. In our case, we can be seen to be current, active and involved, and it provides a positive contribution to our brand perception.

Blogs can also improve search engine performance – some search engines will re-index a site whenever content changes. Blogs add new content and keywords, and offer opportunities for inbound and outbound links for discovery in new searches. 

They enable discussion and improve dialogue with your stakeholders, which is important in today’s marketing environment.

5

Adam Valvasori

Values manager, Body Shop Australia

The Body Shop Australia’s Activist blog is all about making noise to reinforce our five core brand values, which are at the forefront of our business and aim to inspire those who read it.

Our founder, Anita Roddick, is quoted as saying, “Activism isn’t listed on The Body Shop labels as an ingredient, but it is there as surely as the bergamot and hemp oil. The campaigning we do is in our hearts and it is what we want to do.”

This form of online activism makes our campaigns more tangible and accessible, and allows us to communicate with, and inspire, individuals and other corporates wanting to make a difference.

It also provides a forum to comment on global issues and events, and how our business relates to them. It’s unique in the sense there is no financial motivation driving its existence.

Our blog successfully builds The Body Shop’s brand values. Readers can see how passionate we are and how seriously we take them.

People become aware of our campaigns via the blog and then visit one of our stores to find out more from our retail staff, who themselves are passionate activists and live out our values on a day-to-day basis.

Our corporate blog is a relatively low maintenance form of communication. It is a time-efficient outlet for quick and easy distribution of messages to readers on a regular basis. We have at least three regular article posts each week from anyone within the company, from store staff to our CEO.

The variety keeps it fresh and conversational, and we see regular comments posted in relation to articles, demonstrating customer interaction with our brand outside of in-store experiences.

3 Comments

cjunction
  • Wrote on 25 Mar, at 02:07PM
I agree.

A 'Blog' may be the term applied for the function or the software, but the purpose is to communicate a personality - an image - to people that are interested in finding out more.

Whether this is delivered via a blog, a newsletter, letters, over the phone - it doesn’t matter. It should be part of doing business. Customers want to know the type or 'person' they buy from and are associated with. It is tricky dedicating the time to blog, but I agree that it is an extension of brand awareness and building communities, not as a money-making or revenue-generating activity as its primary aim.
DonTsering
  • Wrote on 2 Nov, at 09:17AM
I am a sucker for blogs and love reading them. To me blogs are a way to add human dimensions to a brand and create a personal connection between producer and user.
However, I would not set up one for the pure purpose of generating revenue. Instead, I would tell people about the product/brand and show them how the customer is important to us. I would update them with new developments and stories. The point in setting up a blog is to add the 'likeability factor' so that people choose your products.
A blog should make your business sound like a group of people like the customers themselves working together rather than a gigantic money laundering corporation.
ismaeljames79
  • Wrote on 26 Jan, at 02:07PM
For me a blog is like speaking all my mind. Every time I want to do blogging I just go frenzy and blurt out my feelings. I don't know why but that's what I felt when I am going to blog, that is why I haven't finished any blog.

  • Both the above fields are required for unauthenticated comments. * indicates a required field.


    *

    * This email will not be available or visible to anyone.
    (optional)