WHAT COULD YOUR COMPANY DO
WITH A BLOG?

How Smart Companies Use Blogs for Marketing and PR Success and How You Can Too

EXCERPT

Blogs are not for everyone

Blogs are not an option for every company.

Blogs work in the marketing mix of companies whose products and services are somewhat complex. If your product and service mix lends itself to a blog, there's never been a simpler, more cost-effective way to get closer to your customers, enhance your reputation and increase your sales.

Nobody will read a blog that sounds like a press release or standard company crap. You have to be willing to be conversational, sometimes controversial or confrontational, and occasionally intrepid.

Many bloggers (including this one) are snarky and confrontational. But the fact is, nobody will read a blog that isn't relevant and interesting.

Who should blog for your company? It is important that the people who represent the company in the blog are the same people you would allow to represent the company to the media or to the outside world.

And it has to be someone who is a good writer. Better yet, an excellent writer, with a sense of humor.

To fit the definition of blog, the blog has to be unedited and free from the legal mumbo jumbo that often mars PR material and robs it of credibility. Yes, this is new and different, and perhaps scary. But it is the state of communication today and the realm you must enter to have credibility in the blogosphere.

Blogs make putting information online supremely simple

Blogs are not the answer to every marketing and PR question, but they certainly are a useful tool. You make an entry into the template of a blog, hit the "Publish" button, and you are online. Couldn't be more simple or more suited to those, like me, who lack the technical gene.

When it comes to providing instructions, information and interaction, complete with pictures, sound and even video, blogs are hard to beat.

Blogs sometimes move mountains Many observers agree that blogs have inaugurated a media revolution. "The Web has done one revolutionary thing to journalism. It has made the price of entry into the media market minimal. In days gone by, you needed a small fortune to start up a simple magazine or newspaper. Now you need a laptop and a modem," said blogger Andrew Sullivan, writing in Time magazine.

As Kathleen Parker pointed out in The Springfield News-Leader, http://springfield.news-leader.com/opinions/today/0917-Bloggerske-181027.html "Bloggers love fact-checking television and newspaper reporters and commentators, for instance, and have proved themselves both energetic and competent. They've been credited with challenges that led to the retirements of both Sen. Trent Lott as majority leader and Howell Raines as editor of The New York Times." Lott, for example, was forced to step down from his leadership post after bloggers kept calling attention to a racially insensitive joke that he had made. Bloggers also drew blood in the CBS TV document flap over questionable documents about President Bush's National Guard service during the Vietnam War.

In my own experience, within days of my writing about the fact that the Public Relations Society of America had not included a single session about blogging in its 2004 international conference, I was invited to speak about blogging at the conference.

To put that in perspective, my little blog, which gets under 1,000 page views a day, moved a 20,000-member organization to change its conference agenda.

That's because other bloggers around the world, and several journalists picked up on my challenge to PRSA. The point is, it's not quantity but quality that makes blogs effective. There are traditional journalists among What's Next Blog's readers, as well as other bloggers with reach greater than mine.

Combine individual bloggers spheres of influence, and we become a powerful force. It's one that corporations have to reckon with because bloggers have little to no compunction about embargoes, confidentiality or political correctness.