Marketing Beyond The Blog Buzz
01/13/2012
Within the past week three people from three different industries (advertising, internal branding and higher education) asked me to contribute to posts they were writing about blogs.
Of course I was honored by their requests. However, what was especially interesting to me was every person was concerned (in varing degrees) about the viablity and longevity of blogs in a world of social network clutter.
In 2004, I stepped into the blogosphere with Diva Marketing and soon after began developing workshops for the American Marketing Association on a national and local chapter level. I wondered how different my point of view about blogs was back in the day versus today. So I pulled out a deck I presented to the AMA Oklahoma Chapter in 2005 (!). I thought I would have a Friday the 13th joke on me and I would be appalled at my naivity.
What I found was an evergreen presentation. Sure a few of the slides are out dated and a some of the blogs I used as examples, like Michelle Miller's Wonder Branding, have a more sophisticated look and feel and extended navigation but the concepts still hold today.
10 + 1 Blog Take Aways -- from 2005
1. People talking to people – no corporate talk
2. Easy to maintain, update & publish website
3. Blog elements encourage real-time interaction, creates and maintains relationships
4. Focused on a topic, industry, niche or personality
5. Establishes the author as a subject matter expert
6. Provides readers with renewing sources of credible, trustworthy information, insights and commentary
7. Blog writing is different from other customer communication forms – relevant, informal conversation
8. RSS allows content to be pulled by readers
9. Blogs must be integrated into your marketing strategy to be effective: goals, objectives
10. Blogs promotion includes traditional/internet and blog-specific (social networking: linking, comments, trackbacks; organic search optimization)
Plus 1 Bonus: If you do nothing else – read blogs & monitor the blogosphere
Take a look and let me know what you think.
Adding one more responsibility to an over flowing plate of marketing "stuff to do" is overwhelming. When you include additional tactics to your plan there must, of course, be some type of return. Blogs can help you support your goals and bring the human aspect of your business to life.
IMHO there is no better way to establish, reinforce and sustain a thought leadership positioning especially in a Business-to-Business environment. Yes, girlfriends a blog takes longer to create than a 140 tweet .. as my dad use to tell me, "You get what out of something what you put into it."
