Susan Getgood

Part Two of my blogher comments about customer written weblogs.

Warning: Long

*******************************************************

There are pros and cons with a collaborative weblog. Chief among the pros is that multiple voices means no one person has to post everyday and there is the vibrancy of conversation among the posts as well as in the comments.

And chief among the cons is that multiple voices means it is hard for the blog to develop a voice. Until the conversation gets rolling, and that is just about the hardest part of this, the blog can seem really disjointed.

In the case of Multiple Choice, the benefits of multiple voices far outweigh the difficulties, but if you are considering any form of multiple author blog, including a customer one, be prepared to deal with this.

Now, let’s turn to some advice for anyone considering starting a customer blog. What are the most important steps for the company?

It starts with commitment. For any blog to be successful, the author has to be committed. This is equally true for a customer written blog, and that much harder.

You aren’t talking about one person and her ability to feed her blog. You are talking about a group project, with multiple players, each with their own agenda and reason for participating in the blog. The most critical role is the company project manager or blog editor. Her job is to recruit, motivate, educate and promote the blog and its bloggers. She must be absolutely committed to the blog’s success, and willing to do what it takes to get it done. If she is not, the customer bloggers will sense that this really isn’t an important project for the company. They will lose interest before they even get started.

First, develop your editorial mission and do some validation with your customer base about both the idea of a blog and the editorial mission. We did about a dozen phone interviews with customers that my client had identified as highly engaged and good candidates to be bloggers. The interviews included some discussion about their use of the product, so I could sniff out any latent issues as well as get to know the customers. This helped me as a consultant get to know our blogger candidates a little bit. If you have someone internal do this part, you might structure it differently. 

Then you start recruiting. In our case, we spent a lot of time working with the customers to help them understand blogging, our proposed blog, and the commitment it would require from them. I developed a FAQ to answer the common questions, held a phone training session with every blogger to get them going with TypePad (our chosen platform), provided them with extensive reference materials, and did a lot of initial handholding.

Eventually we had enough bloggers to go live. Over time, the company has recruited a few more giving Multiple Choice a total of five active customer bloggers. The absolute hardest part of this recruitment process was bringing this solid reference group up to speed with the blog and blogging.

Then you have to motivate them to write. This is why the company’s commitment is so absolutely critical. You are asking people to take 20-30 minutes out their week to write for your blog. They need to see that you are doing the same. And you need to help them, by suggesting topics or highlighting newsworthy events.  Bottom line, you have to make it easy for them, or they won’t get started. Once they get started, some of them will take to it like ducks to water and need relatively little ongoing help. Others will need you to hold their hand for quite a while. It takes somewhere from six to eight months for everything to solidify.

So what can you do to get the conversation going? Well, you are already monitoring the blogosphere for mentions of your company and issues of interest. It is a simple step to send a short e-mail every so often to your bloggers and let them know something interesting BEFORE you blog it. That gives your bloggers a chance to write on the topic first. Something really hot? Pick up the phone. It still works. Really.

What else? Well, assuming you get the conversation going on your blog, you need to start actively promoting it, in an appropriate fashion, on other blogs. That means leaving comments and sending trackbacks. And again, here you have to help your bloggers out, at least initially. If one of your writers has posted something extremely brilliant about topic X, and you see topic X on another blog, don’t just tell your blogger and hope they have time to go over and leave a comment. That’s work.

Leave a short comment yourself, referencing the brilliant post, and also tell your blogger so she can decide if she wants to add more information, either in a comment or a follow-on post. You have to make it easy. Of course, you want your bloggers to be reading and commenting like crazy, driving traffic to your wonderful blog. But don’t count on it. Take charge of the situation.

Now this is NOT an invitation to start leaving comment spam. Your e-mail should clearly identify yourself, your role, the blogger and the relevant post. Plus a short commentary that makes sense in the context of the post you are commenting on. Don’t write too much – leave that for your blogger.

Hi. My name is Susan Getgood. I am the managing editor of Multiple Choice, a collaborative educational weblog. One of our bloggers, Mary Smith from Doe University recently posted on this topic. In her post, (insert name of post and link here or full URL if no html allowed by the blog) she talks about X, Y, Z. 

Or perhaps: She agrees with/disagrees with you, (then elucidate briefly on the dis/agreement.)

Lastly, a few housekeeping things.

Don’t forget to use all your existing marketing vehicles to communicate about the blog to the intended audience. Add the URL to printed materials. Put buttons and links on your website. Issue a press release. Include it in your newsletter if you have one. If you don’t have one, start one. E-mail an announcement to your customers. Post about it in relevant forums. And so on……

In the B2B context, your bloggers probably are doing this as part of their professional development. Make sure you include their bios on the blog, and give them substantial play whenever you can. Likewise, you need to be updating the blog search engines through Pingomatic or RSS Submit or whatever you use. Do not expect or ask them to do it.

If you are a consultant, try to get at least a six month commitment so you can get the blog solid before you leave the project. If you are doing the bulk of the development and then transitioning it to an internal person, it is going to take her more than a few weeks or a month to get up to speed. In that period, the blog easily can lose momentum.

A customer written blog can be both the most satisfying and the most frustrating experience you will ever have. I think I’ve given you some flavor of why it can be frustrating – a customer blog is hard work and it takes time to get it right. And you have to do the work, or don’t bother; as the saying goes, if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well.

But after all that work, when you see it start to gel —  bloggers blogging, and commenting, talking with each other in a community space that you created – you have the satisfaction of knowing you created something unique and valuable, both for the company and the community.

Hey, if it were easy, anybody could do it.

Warning: Long

As I’ve mentioned before on the blog, I will be at blogher in Santa Clara this weekend. I will be part of a marketing panel, sharing some of my experiences developing a customer-written blog.

As I always do, I have prepared my notes as both a speaking outline and a two-part post. Below is Part One: What type of company should consider a customer written blog.

*************************************************************

Hi. My name is Susan Getgood. My role here is to talk to you about customer blogs. And not independent blogs by customers or fans of a product. Rather company sponsored blogs for which the chief writers are customers.

As a marketer, I am a strong believer in the voice of the customer. For a long time, I have felt that the true voice of the customer has been missing from corporate marketing efforts. Mostly because we are afraid. Of what they might say. Of what we might have to do. Of the unknown.

So when I first learned about blogs not that long ago, one of my first thoughts was how this form would allow a company and its customers to really connect … if the company had both the character and commitment to make it happen.

Not long after, I found myself working with a client company that wanted to find a way to involve a happy customer base more actively in its marketing.

Long and short, we decided to do a blog.

Along the way, I developed a list of company characteristics that lend themselves well to customer blogging. As well as some tips about developing a customer written blog.

Let’s start with who should consider a customer blog.

I will use my client Software Secure and its blog Multiple Choice as an example throughout this discussion. Software Secure is in the education software business. Specifically they develop solutions that allow schools to prevent cheating on tests administered using laptops. Multiple Choice is at http://softwaresecure.typepad.com

First, character.

Criteria number one: the customers must LOVE the product. If you don’t have fans, you probably don’t want to do a customer blog.

Your fans, or evangelists, are both advocates and references. It is not just what they say, it is the mere fact that they are willing to say it to their peers in a public forum that offers value for your marketing program. Yes, of course, they have their occasional issues, but in my client’s case, they were happy, and articulate, customers who were already presenting about the company’s products at conferences on a regular basis. So, you have to know your base, know that by and large they are happy with your company and its products. If they aren’t, spend your time fixing that before worrying about blogging.

Second, the audience has to be online, and receptive to participating in an online community. The customers have to already be talking in some fashion.

Generally, the education software market is a highly engaged market. People know each other, and communicate through trade associations, loose affiliations, and yes, blogs.  The existence of a strong blogging community and fan blogs is a good clue that you have an engaged market 🙂

It helps a lot if there is an information gap you can exploit. As we were doing our marketing research, we discovered that there weren’t many online resources that focus specifically on developing a secure learning and testing environment. There were lots of big general sites, with lots and lots of information. Sometimes too much information.

We decided that this gap would be a good spot for our collaborative weblog written by Software Secure customers and other educational experts.

Finally, you have to be willing to give up some degree of control. No one wants to read a blog that just talks about a product, no matter who is writing.

You must develop an editorial mission for your customer blog that is related to your products, but is broad enough to allow a real conversation to develop among your customers and prospective customers. That means having the confidence that the sponsorship of a valuable, vibrant blog will build brand awareness and preference. You don’t need to control every word. And go back to point number one: your customers must love the product and the company.

Here’s how we describe Multiple Choice:

Multiple Choice brings together educators who are leading the way in building secure online learning and testing environments at schools and universities across North America.

Our sponsor is Software Secure, developer of technology that secures the computing environment from cheating and digital distractions.

The sponsorship is clear, the bloggers post directly to the blog (no company review) and they can write about whatever they like within the topic of secure online testing and learning. They are not limited to blogging about the company. How boring would that be.

So, in theory, customer blogging is a great idea. What about in practice?

That’s part two: what you need to do to make it work. I’ll post it on Saturday after the blogher session 🙂