Corporate Blogging Survey Results
Thursday, July 7th, 2005
Backbone Media just released a White Paper with a Summary on their survey of Corporate Bloggers and the results these blogging companies have experienced for their efforts so far. They even ended up creating a blog that takes these best strategies and helps businesses get up and blogging the right way.
The summary… it works! Blogs are cheap, easy to use, generate tons of traffic and acquires almost instantaneous feedback from customers and prospects. Basically, Blogging for business works….
“Every company is at a different stage in their blogging efforts, some are dipping their toe into blogging and getting good results, in terms of higher search engine rankings and thought leadership, while others have changed their whole product development process to make their company as open and transparent to customers as possible. The benefits of blogging are many, but it seems that to build and achieve the best results using blogs, a company must cross a cultural chasm that turns customers into brand evangelists.”
Transparency, now that is a word that IMHO goes synonymously with Business Blogging, and what John Cass of Backbone Media says in his quote above is correct, you have to be willing to cross a historical line in the sand in order to truly achieve the potential of what a blog can do for your company.
Allowing your customers, critics, and competitors access to view a public forum of communication can be risky if there is the potential for a negative customer experience or a critique to be aired for all to see…. that is if you have that old PR mindset of “CONTROL THE INFORMATION FLOW”!!
What some businesses are catching onto is that having dirty laundry aired in public allows them the ability to also publicly show how they addressed the concern, fixed the issue, and also have the opportunity to express how they will never allow this to happen again. We all make mistakes and your customers know you do too even if you never let them know about it. Doing this publicly allows you to develop a sense of trust with a broad audience that would have taken years to develop individually through a “controlled” information environment.
That is a truly powerful thing and a marketers dream come true… Imagine being able to take every single negative customer experience and turn that into a positive outcome further strengthening your relationship with them and ten others. Before blogging that never would have been possible.
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