Christopher Carfi (The Social Customer Manifesto) has a nice series of posts about the types of business blogs. So far there are four posts in the series called The Business Bloggers Field Guide. One Two Three Four
I think these are really good examples for companies to use when they are trying to decide what type of blogging makes sense for them. See my previous posts this week on why I think they need to be blogging in the first place.
This post has been brewing in my head for a while and today I saw an item over at David Weinberger’s blog JOHO that told me it was time to write it. There is lots of good stuff on his blog, but the thing that got me going was a brief reference to an article he recently posted on Worthwhile magazine: Oh why cahn’t the marketers … learn … to … speak
Corporate websites suck for a lot of reasons, one of which Weinberger’s post nails on the head. We have forgotten how to speak in simple, direct sentences that clearly tell the listener that we a) understand his need/problem and b) have a product/service that can help her. Instead we fill the space with jargon laden positioning statements, sexy flash movies, feature lists and product specs, interactive demos (that show all the features), white papers and tons and tons of press releases.
And just to show that we haven’t forgotten our customers, there’s a section for Support (mostly aimed at removing the need for the customer to ever actually CALL us) and a Case Studies section with a bunch of well written, but highly edited Success Stories.
But very rarely is there a public place where the company and its customers come together in a dialogue … dare I say a community. If something like this does exist, it is most often behind security to protect it from the prying eyes of people who are "not us." Competitors. The media. Prospects (heaven forbid they learn of a possible problem before they buy. Let’s get the money first.) Or if the Forum is public, it is moderated so "bad stuff" can be better managed.
Now, I sense that this is changing as blogs permeate the fabric of the Web and our lives. But for the most part, this is the world as I have known it.
And full disclosure, in many of my past assignments, I have been a willing participant in crafting positioning statements about the leading provider of state of the art blah blah. I’m actually pretty good at it. But I have come to the conclusion that it doesn’t work. Because what this behavior has created is corporate websites that suck.
Define suck, you ask. They suck because the site covers all that stuff that the company thinks is important. Product features. Why our widget is better than the other guy’s widget. Demos of products. Death by Powerpoint.
They forget that fundamentally your prospects aren’t really that interested in your product. They are interested in satisfying a desire or solving a problem. What your site should be doing is clearly communicating to the prospect that you understand his problem and then showing her how your product can help. To be fair, many websites TRY to do this. We try to stay focused on needs first, our benefits second. But we don’t go far enough and that is why we still suck.
So what do I think is far enough? I think we have to stop being afraid of our customer and let her voice speak on our websites. In her own voice, not just in edited case studies. By all means, write case studies. They are useful marcomm tools. Some of your printed collateral may even make it back home from the trade show (and not in the hotel rubbish).
But let your customers speak, and in public. Create unmoderated support forums where customers can help each other. Create public spaces where your customers can meet with your employees to talk about issues of mutual interest — yes, your products, but also regulatory issues, business trends — whatever is at the intersection of mutual interest. These can be old-style forums or blogs, or whatever suits your fancy. But if you’ve got happy, contented customers, help them tell others about how great you are. It is word of mouth on steroids and it will resonate with your audience far better than ANYTHING you could ever say.
That doesn’t mean you should stop all traditional marketing efforts. I think that all those other things we do: direct mail, advertising, newsletters, PR, trade shows, etc etc all have an important place in our marketing mix. But it is time we stop treating our website as an electronic brochure, and really embrace the possibilities that the WWW offers us for engaging in a conversation with our customers.
Oh, and if you are afraid of what your customers might say, or that your product sucks, fix that first. Don’t keep trying to hide behind a corporate website that sucks.
In my last post, I put forward four principals of a good PR strategy. Here’s the fifth: Get Blogging.
There are a lot of people thinking and talking about the topic of how blogs fit into corporate communications, and indeed, into mass communications alltogether. I’ve got some links to some recent ones that I found interesting at the bottom of this post, and eventually I’ll get around to doing a listing of some of the blogs I like.
But, what should you DO about blogs? How does blogging fit into your short and long term corp comm strategy?
Here are a few things I think most companies can do to get started.
1. It may not make sense for you to start a corporate blog right now, but you had better be monitoring the blogosphere for mentions of your company and product, and dealing with the good and the bad right away. Tools like Feedster, PubSub, MyYahoo!, Google Search, Technorati all help do this in slightly different ways. People ARE talking about you, it is time you joined the conversation.
2. There are blog writers out there covering your space. Call them citizen journalists or just plain citizens, many of them are important writers for the audiences you are trying to reach. Do not make the mistake of ignoring them because they are "just bloggers." You may want to cultivate them even more carefully than a "regular reporter."
3. Publish your press releases and other corp comms with an RSS feed — it will make life easier for reporters who do want to track your firm. But don’t confuse using the tool (RSS) for a blog. If you want to have a corporate weblog, it has to be an authentic blog, not just the static press releases. And it is even better by the way, if you do add richer content to this feed than just the standard 2-page press release. It bears repeating however — be VERY CLEAR about what this is — your press releases and corp comms with an RSS feed simply to make it easier for folks who want to track your firm using a news aggregator.
4. Get blogging yourselves. Figure which kind of blogging activity makes sense for your firm, and just do it. You can start by choosing among 3 alternatives, and they are all reasonable ways to start — it just depends on what makes sense for you. You can:
Here are a few other folks with recent posts that relate in some fashion to the the topic of PR, corporate communications and blogs. Some of the links are originally courtesy of Scoble’s LinkBlog, others from Dan Gillmor’s blog.
Pheedo article about pr agency MWW getting into blogging. Mostly interesting as an example of a "big-time" agency publicly embracing blogging.
NevOn article: Five examples of great thinking. (NevOn blog is also a good place to find links to corporate blogs — look on the left hand side, about midway down the page.)
PressThink post: Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over. Thought-provoking piece on the fine line between journalism and blogging. While not specifically about corporate blogging, it is important for marketers to understand the debates going on about blogging and journalism if we want to meet our customers, including both the professional and grassroots media (aka citizen journalists), in the right places, in the right way, with the right expectations.
Update 20 January: Lots of traffic today about the Ketchum/Williams/Dept of Ed/No Child Left Behind PR/spokesperson fiasco. Not really about corporate blogging but interesting to follow the ethical discussion. Best place to start if you want to follow the discussion: Jay Rosen’s PressThink blog has a great post, with lots of links to other comments.
There has been a lot of discussion recently in both the traditional media and the blogosphere about corporate blogging. I’d like to talk a bit about how blogging fits, and doesn’t fit, into corporate communications and public relations strategy.
Before we can do that, however, we need to define a sound communications strategy. Caveat emptor: my professional experience has mostly been with technology companies, so this discussion may be more relevant to that arena. Nevertheless, I think the four principals I’m going to put forward can be applied pretty broadly.
First Principal: The audience isn’t stupid; don’t make the mistake of thinking they are.
PR can’t help you if your products are awful, poorly positioned or don’t meet market needs. Don’t waste your time or money on PR until you’ve fixed the product and your business. Seems self-evident but there are a lot of folks in this world who think you can fool reporters. You never could, and in this day of grassroots journalism, everyone’s a reporter. It has never been more true: you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
Second Principal: In a nutshell, a good PR strategy focuses on finding out what reporters want/need to know and fitting in with the news of the moment if you can. It is NOT about flogging your products and multi-page press releases that cover every last feature.
Don’t confuse PR with promotion or publicity. You can do those too. Public Relations is something different, and you need to do PR right.
The first step to doing it right? Understanding that nobody but you really cares about your product in and of itself. Not even your customer. Your customer has a problem to be solved or a desire to be satisfied. Your product or service is only valuable to her in as much as it solves the problem or scratches the itch.
The media is a conduit to your customer, so reporters will care about the same exact things your prospects do. Problems. Issues. Desire. Needs. Not products.
So, be smart. Don’t try to engage reporters about the newest product features or your great new pricing strategy. Instead seek to understand what their problems are, what stories they are interested in or writing, what trends they are following. And if your product fits the story or you have data that informs the trend, tell them about it. By all means, talk about your product or service when it is relevant to the reporter’s inquiry. Create material that will interest reporters. But stay in the context of the reporter’s inquiry and interests. Don’t waste your time trying to jam your product features into his story. He won’t write about it if it doesn’t fit, and you waste the opportunity to build a good relationship with a journalist.
Third Principal: Invest in a good PR person. If you can afford it, get BOTH a good agency and hire an in-house person focused on corp comm. If you have to make a choice, start with the agency and add in-house resources as you grow.
Why agency first? Three reasons. First, you get access to a depth of resources that you probably can’t afford to bring in-house, at least in the early days. Second, agency staff are talking to reporters all the time, for both you and other clients. A story opportunity for you could come up during a conversation about another client, just as a by-product of a conversation. Finally (and obviously): you can control your costs, dialing up the spend as you grow.
Don’t assume you have to have a big name agency. There are scores of small boutique agencies that have terrific media relationships. I have always found it better to be the big fish in the small pond than the small fish in the big one.
Fourth Principal: Never forget that you are doing PR to get the word out about your products to the audiences that might buy them. Don’t get seduced by the number of website pick-ups or column inches you got. Measure your results, but measure the right things.
Evaluate your PR strategy, and your PR team, on how well they get the word out in the media vehicles that matter to your audiences. It might be The New York Times. But it might just as easily be a blog or an industry newsletter.
Stay focused always on your marketing strategy and the results. When I worked for a software company that offered a free trial download, we always saw a spike in downloads after a flurry of stories that mentioned our products, even when the mention was simply in passing.
Next post: We’ll delve into how blogging fits into our good PR strategy.
A while ago, I posted some criteria I thought made sense for companies considering whether a company blog (as distinct from employee blogs) made sense as a marketing tool. You’ll find them at the end of my To blog or not to blog post.
Today, Jennifer Rice at What’s Your Brand Mantra wrote about a corporate blog that is an excellent example of the two key criteria that I talked about in my post: an open culture and a community of users that are engaged by and engage with the vendor. Bigha makes ergonomic bicycles and laser pointers. Jennifer’s excellent post talks about how the company has successfully used its blog and website to engage with its public, a transparency that is helping the firm through a communications crisis related to improper use of laser pointers. Visit their website and blog for the full story, and to see how blogging can work as a corporate communications tool when it is done right.
