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By Scott Yaw
Develop an Internal and External Marketing Plan: Developing a strategy for how the company will tell the world about its blog is an equally critical business decision. There are many key issues. Some examples: Where it will the blog appear on the corporate web site? Will it carry e-mail signatures? What type of information interests visitors? What information is the company comfortable sharing with internal and external visitors? How will the company handle bad news postings when they inevitably happen? Should the blog be advertised like other products or through RSS news aggregators? Again, outsource this to a good public relations, branding or communications agency that works with small business and startups. You may not know what you’re doing—but there are folks out there who do.
Track and Measure What Executive Management Values: Today, most companies say, “If we can’t instantly measure return, it won’t stay funded.” When companies link blogs to specific business goals, it helps management rationalize exposure and risk that they represent. Blog-specific measurements such as traffic levels are essentials. To track ROI, companies must also track incoming links as a quantifiable data of the blog’s effectiveness. For example, monitoring the volume of transactions that originate from blog postings and tracking the decline of complaints in various service inquiries are a good metric executive management understands.
Turn to Branding Experts
When corporate blogging starts to strike terror into the hearts of senior management, it is time to call upon the experts. Once blog burned, many savvy companies are turning to branding consultants to facilitate in the creation and proactive monitoring of a corporate blog. The basic rational for this is –- companies are too emotionally involved in their brands to be objective about harsh blog postings. Therefore, companies can become overly defensive in answering these postings with a truthful response. Like other vehicles in business communications, blogs need to be “managed." Left “unmanaged,, blogs can cause instant damage to corporate and product reputations. Blogs can also be used constructively to communicate with consumers that do not consume traditional forms of marketing messages.
As the world of blogs evolves, so will application and readership content. At some point, many argue that blog sites due to their speed and breadth of communication could replace many forms of traditional advertising, PR and marketing executions. But, one thing that cannot and will not change is the level of “truth and authenticity” needed to strengthen and maintain a corporate brand. Keep in mind, your brand is all that you are and in everything you do. Blogs are just another new vehicle for expedited feedback.
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