Of the approximately 112.5 million blogs on the Web, almost 5,000 are corporate, according to blog indexer Technorati. Blogging originated to start online conversations and be a part of a virtual community, but corporate bloggers are in it for other reasons: talking directly to customers or giving a personal touch to a big business.
“It’s a phenomenal promotion vehicle for a company, or a great crisis tool or a great customer service tool,” said Geoff Livingston, a public relations strategist and social media expert.
Smaller businesses are experimenting, too, since a blog can be an economical way of getting attention.
“It’s a small business, so we don’t have a marketing budget,” said Robb Duncan, who began a blog for his Georgetown gelato shop, Dolcezza, about two years ago. “We’ve never done any ads or promoting because we can’t afford it. So I guess it’s kind of guerrilla marketing, and it’s free.”
When his second store opened in Bethesda in July, Duncan used his blog to advertise an opening night ice cream giveaway. He ended up serving over 300 gallons of ice cream to more than 1,000 customers that night.
Read more of this Washington Post story: Marketing Moves to the Blogosphere
Blogging is an excellent new business tool, especially for small and midsize ad agencies. It provide your agency with:
- A much larger online presence
- An economical way to get attention
- A way to connect and build relationships with your target audience
- An effective way to generate relevant inbound leads
It does these things and more but, only if you create your agency’s blog correctly. It isn’t a place to “sell” your agencies services. The moment you start selling, touting your expertise, is the moment you will lose your audience.
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Blogs are an extension of social media in my opinion! A company should have a blog for sure but i think essentially today a blog is a social media landing page also.
So to give you a case study … I’ve been helping out a friend to market his product – it’s called Deskaway (http://www.deskaway.com) (fantastic btw, we use it. A web based project management tool that acts as an online repository of all work we do for clients – makes work more streamlined).
So DeskAway has created multiple properties in social media that many consumers go to. The cost is minimal. Deskaway manages to add value through content and many customers feel like DeskAway is always listening so they stick on – and tell others about it. This breeds more business for a tool that is a great product (all small businesses should use such a tool!)
Here’s a list of their Social media properties , take a look to get an idea of what i am talking about:
On Facebook – http://www.new.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/Deskaway/34895509600?ref=nf
On Twitter – http://twitter.com/deskaway
On Get Satisfaction – http://getsatisfaction.com/deskaway
An active blog! – http://www.deskaway.com/blog/
They are getting friendfeed and they also drive all activity through their homepage and newsletters et al. Works will – good reach with minimal effort.
I’ve been trying to convince Sahil (founder of DeskAway)to get users of DeskAway to write on their blog – and incentivise them with upgrades etc. – increasing virality!
So essentially all these social media properties also mash up on the blog which is essentially more of a social media gateway…
What do u think? Works well?