Saturday, February 25, 2006
Business blogs: Fad or long term communications tool
Business blogs are often referred to as being a fad. You know the line. It usually includes terms like "fad", "personal diary", "self important", and of course "waste of time and resources".
Variations on those themes appear all of the time in print, online, and broadcast media. You will also hear them quite frequently in personal or daily business conversations. Can a blog really be compared to that very famous fad, the hula hoop?
The questions usually revolve around the blogging content, the blog value in the near and long term, and the overall staying power of blogs. These are legitimate questions, and indeed, they deserve answers. If we business bloggers are serious about speading the word about the value of blogs to companies of all sizes, we must consider the objections.
First of all, business blogs as a marketing and public relations communications tool are still in their relative infancy. The number of blogging businesses is still very small. The number is so low that a new corporate blog still makes the news for its alleged innovative aspect. If that's the case, then blogs still have a long way to go to entirely permeate mainstream business and media thinking.
My good friend John Jantsch (pictured left) of Duct Tape Marketing considers the possibility that while blogs may have had a "fad" period, that time has already passed into history.
John Jantsch says this about business blogging as a fad:
Blogging as a business fad seems to be passing - and that's a good thing.
Now maybe people will settle down and look at a blog, at using a blog for business, for what it is. Just another, albeit powerful, marketing tool.
Yes, every business needs a blog, not so they can say they have one, so they can finally say something because they have one. Now I'm not saying that you can't have open and transparent conversations with your clients and prospects through other means, I'm just saying that people don't.
As John says, blogs are being recognized for their value as marketing and public relations tools. As a communications medium for sharing the company's ideas and vision, a blog is a very powerful tool. Along with company specific data and facts, a blog also provides general information on the industry, other knowledge sources, and product use assistance. The concepts provided by a business blog are limited only by the writer's imagination.
Blogs definitely have the potential to grow as a information sharing tool. They are informal in tone, introduce a real person instead of the cliche of the faceless corporation, and are timely in their presentation. The flexibility offered by blogging is one reason that blogs will last in the business tool box.
The blog's purpose and presentation can be changed over time to reflect new business goals and realities. The very nature of blogs is to evolve to fit new conditions. Unlike the blog, a fad item is fixed at a certain time and place, and lacks the built-in flexibility to develop new uses. The fad never changes from its original purpose, and so it disappears with time.
The next time you are faced with someone stating that a blog is merely some new fad, you can provide an alternative picture. Perhaps you will create a new convert to the field of blogging.
As a blog evangelist, you will have achieved your goal.
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I also think it's important for business people thinking about blogging to remember this - that advertising is simply no longer doing the efficient job it once did. And how can it, when the average American gets bombarded with over 3,000 of them a day, according to many reports? I believe that what customers are looking for (or at least what I'm looking for) is to once again have a more intimate and real relationship with the companies they patronize; like what that relationship was like before the Industrial Revolution, for example, before the age of factories and national catalogs, when customers and companies interacted simply through the physical transactions that took place at the store.
This is the thing I recommend more than anything else, for new business executives who are on the fence about blogging, or just starting up a new one: to think of it as if you were the owner of a little store for your business, and that your blog was you having small talks with the customers who have come in the store. It's easy for a lot of us to imagine what to do in that situation, I think, because most of us actually had one experience or another like this in our youth. You can directly apply those thoughts to your blog as well; that it's mostly about having small, quiet talks with your customers about new products, new features, recent things going on at the company, even unrelated topics sometimes ("How about that recent thing in the news?"; "What amazing weather we're having here today"). It's simply that you're having this intimate conversation with thousands of customers at once, that's all (that is, if you're lucky, and write a good blog).
This is the thing I recommend more than anything else, for new business executives who are on the fence about blogging, or just starting up a new one: to think of it as if you were the owner of a little store for your business, and that your blog was you having small talks with the customers who have come in the store. It's easy for a lot of us to imagine what to do in that situation, I think, because most of us actually had one experience or another like this in our youth. You can directly apply those thoughts to your blog as well; that it's mostly about having small, quiet talks with your customers about new products, new features, recent things going on at the company, even unrelated topics sometimes ("How about that recent thing in the news?"; "What amazing weather we're having here today"). It's simply that you're having this intimate conversation with thousands of customers at once, that's all (that is, if you're lucky, and write a good blog).
Hi Jason. Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I agree that traditional advertising has lost much of its effectiveness, based on volume alone. On the other hand, blogs do have far to go in filling in the gap left by the drop in advertising value. Over time, that will change, as business blogs become more mainstream. Blogs must provide value too, and not fall into the trap of becoming simply glorified advertising flyers. Those blogs are very ineffective and may even harm the company's image.
Well, I CAN say I agree with Mr. Hurlbert... at least as far as the end of the first paragraph.
On the Internet, a repository of free reference information and (only recently) true community interaction, corporate blogging will succeed only as far corporate web pages have. Those who don't realize this will be part of the "those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it" crowd who will invest bundles of cash in an Online Presence and expect that to be enough. Marketing and selling are "persuasion" incarnate. Blogs are read by people who share the opinion of the blogger (or secretly hope that they'll "come around" to "right" thinking) and ignored by those who don't. This, of course, results in the "Preaching to the Choir" syndrome and is a complete waste of resources.
Now, I agree that those people who realize immediately that making a blog a contact point for expert assistance might be able to make a buck on the pure quality of the content. Doing this big enough might actually work the way it has for some web sites (Lexus-Nexus, anyone?) However, the only way any of the "personal diary", "self important", and "waste of time and resources" run-of-the-mill bloggers are ever going to REALLY transform this from "fad" to "viable" will be to draw repeat readers and hammer them with internet ads.
If a CEO or other executive officer of even a medium-sized small business ever makes the effort to have contact with his customers "one-on-one" through a blog he will at best them to come to realize this is as satisfying an exchange as leaving a message in voice mail and at worst spend so much time on the effort that he NEGLECTS critical business planning and management.
"Business Bloggers" are the snake-oil salesmen of the old-west, the dot-com venture capitalists of the late nineties, and the mega-huge-credit-card-companies of today all rolled into one: promising miracle cures and fast money with no risk and no consequences (ok...maybe that's a little exaggerated...snake-oil salesmen didn't promise fast money). Their efforts seem akin to those late-night "you won't believe how much money you can make" real estate systems. The only ones who'll end up making money are the ones who can sell the most books and ads telling others how to make money! (Although I'm all in favor of them doing it...if people haven't learned better by now, there's no point in someone ELSE getting their money from them - remember PT Barnum).
For the long term, though, the Business Bloggers with a more altruistic, honest-money bent could help things dramatically by doing two simple things:
1) STOP SELLING THE IDEA LIKE YOU'RE DESPERATE FOR SOMEONE TO BELIEVE YOU
2) MAKE SOME MONEY OFF YOUR BLOG THAT DOESN'T INVOLVE SELLING INFO ABOUT HOW TO BLOG!
Sheesh...if it's such an amazing business/marketing opportunity, do like the great inventors and self-made people have always done (including the inventor of the blog): DO something with it that blows people's socks off!
On the Internet, a repository of free reference information and (only recently) true community interaction, corporate blogging will succeed only as far corporate web pages have. Those who don't realize this will be part of the "those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it" crowd who will invest bundles of cash in an Online Presence and expect that to be enough. Marketing and selling are "persuasion" incarnate. Blogs are read by people who share the opinion of the blogger (or secretly hope that they'll "come around" to "right" thinking) and ignored by those who don't. This, of course, results in the "Preaching to the Choir" syndrome and is a complete waste of resources.
Now, I agree that those people who realize immediately that making a blog a contact point for expert assistance might be able to make a buck on the pure quality of the content. Doing this big enough might actually work the way it has for some web sites (Lexus-Nexus, anyone?) However, the only way any of the "personal diary", "self important", and "waste of time and resources" run-of-the-mill bloggers are ever going to REALLY transform this from "fad" to "viable" will be to draw repeat readers and hammer them with internet ads.
If a CEO or other executive officer of even a medium-sized small business ever makes the effort to have contact with his customers "one-on-one" through a blog he will at best them to come to realize this is as satisfying an exchange as leaving a message in voice mail and at worst spend so much time on the effort that he NEGLECTS critical business planning and management.
"Business Bloggers" are the snake-oil salesmen of the old-west, the dot-com venture capitalists of the late nineties, and the mega-huge-credit-card-companies of today all rolled into one: promising miracle cures and fast money with no risk and no consequences (ok...maybe that's a little exaggerated...snake-oil salesmen didn't promise fast money). Their efforts seem akin to those late-night "you won't believe how much money you can make" real estate systems. The only ones who'll end up making money are the ones who can sell the most books and ads telling others how to make money! (Although I'm all in favor of them doing it...if people haven't learned better by now, there's no point in someone ELSE getting their money from them - remember PT Barnum).
For the long term, though, the Business Bloggers with a more altruistic, honest-money bent could help things dramatically by doing two simple things:
1) STOP SELLING THE IDEA LIKE YOU'RE DESPERATE FOR SOMEONE TO BELIEVE YOU
2) MAKE SOME MONEY OFF YOUR BLOG THAT DOESN'T INVOLVE SELLING INFO ABOUT HOW TO BLOG!
Sheesh...if it's such an amazing business/marketing opportunity, do like the great inventors and self-made people have always done (including the inventor of the blog): DO something with it that blows people's socks off!
# posted by 
: 3:25 PM
: 3:25 PM
Wayne, glad to see another Canadian among the bloggers. I think John is right, in that blogs can be powerful marketing tools, if used properly. Unfortunately, there's a lot of garbage to sift through - and luckily, one good blog find can make it more than worthwhile.
http://www.templarbond.com
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