Biz Blog Profile Series: Intuit QuickBooks Online Blog

04/05/2005

Biz Blog Profile: is a behind the scene look at how corporations, non profits and higher education institutions are using blogs to support their marketing goals.

Paul Rosenfield, General Manager for QuickBooks Online, is not afraid of challenging the status quo and pushing the envelope. Especially when it comes to implementing new strategies that bring his team closer to Intuit's customers and help customers establish trust with the product and the people who are the product.

Biz Blog Profile: QuickBooks Online

Quickbooks_logo_1 About Intuit
Intuit is the leading provider of personal and small business financial management tools, with such products as Quicken, TurboTax, and QuickBooks. QuickBooks Online Edition is the web-based version of the popular QuickBooks software that is used by 3MM small businesses.

Why Intuit is Blogging via QuickBooks Online
Because QuickBooks Online Edition is a service that you pay $20/month and access over the internet, we have found prospective customers want to feel confident in placing their sensitive data online. One way to achieve this trust and confidence is to share information about who we are, what we're working on to help customers and improve the business, and be honest about our "warts" when we have them.

How Blogs Fit Into Intuit's Marketing Strategy
Our key marketing strategy is placing our customers at the center of all our marketing. We do this because we have a service that revolutionizes our customers' lives via anytime/anywhere access and their testimonials speak far better to prospects than reading sterile marketing copy.

Selling-in To Management
I have long felt open, direct conversations with customers are an excellent way to instill trust and confidence. When an employee approached me about blogs, I greenlighted the effort. Two days later we launched our blog on Typepad.

How Intuit is Marketing the QuickBooks Online Blog

We have integrated our blog directly into our service home page, community boards, and prominently on our marketing website. We have much, much more we can do to increase our visibility. For instance, we will be bringing a RSS feed directly onto the service home page.

Future Direction
Improved integration into all marketing vehicles, especially our marketing website and service website. Inspiring and encouraging more employees in the group to blog. Inspiring the rest of Intuit to blog. Seamlessly weaving blog into the community board experience so we can more easily respond to posts. Creating a "development only" blog.

Paul Rosenfield On Blogs

At heart, blogs belong to all the employees - not the marketing organization. Just like Ted Levitt said, "Marketing is too important to trust to Marketers." So too, do Blogs belong across all the key processes of an organization. To place it within Marketing is to potentially defuse the potency and lose valuable conversations that Support, Operations, and Development can contribute to and learn from customers.

Blogs are also very easy to do. Don't ever let anyone say, "Well, blogs aren't a priority right now." Those who say that don't know what blogs are. The easy ability to publish a short blog entry on a volunteer basis makes blogs an ideal "just do it" initiative. Far too often big companies squash the initiative and drive of motivated passionate employees in their misbegotten zeal to "think big" and "be strategic". Our blog took two days to design and costs us $15/month through Typepad.

Sidebar: The Mona Lisa of Blogs, Debbie Weil, also interviewed Paul. Great read.

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» Intuit's blog from Estate Legacy Vaults Blog

Why Intuit is Blogging via QuickBooks Online Because QuickBooks Online Edition is a service that you pay $20/month and access over the internet, we have found prospective customers want to feel confident in placing their sensitive data online....&#... [Read More]

Tracked on Apr 8, 2005 1:51:11 PM

» Paul Rosenfeld on Intuit's QuickBooks Online Edition Blog from Backbone Blogging Survey
Paul Rosenfeld is the General Manager for QuickBooks Online Edition and man behind the Quickbooks Online Weblog. Paul explained on a panel at the business blog summit in San Francisco that Intuit is passionate about customers, and his team of... [Read More]

Tracked on Sep 23, 2005 2:05:23 PM

Comments

Excellent overview of the importance of business blogs to the marketing mix!

Posted by: Diego from metacool on Apr 18, 2005 3:39:53 PM

Toby,

I had no idea you were also doing a QuickBooks Online blog profile. One of those "great minds think alike" coincidences! You can find my Case Study on QB Online's blog at: http://blogwrite.blogs.com/blogwrite/2005/04/case_study_all_.html#more

All best,

Debbie

Posted by: Debbie Weil on Apr 19, 2005 3:45:19 PM

Throwing their personal data online is vitally important in the whole scheme os things as desktop publishing is just another step that can be eliminated by going online as most of it is published to the online environment anyway. Those books are the bomb!
kind regards,
Brin
http://loan.valueprep.com/payday-loan-online.html

Posted by: Brin on Oct 26, 2005 12:32:16 PM

Chris Locke writes about "Indigo Children," a meme reported on by the New York Times. The Indigo idea sounds like it pushes a whole bunch of buttons all at once — New Age, angels, the paranormal, child-worship, ADD. If it had some anti-child-porn hysteria about it, it'd be perfect. As one of the people in the NYT article says, this is basically the same social world view as Harry Potter's muggles v. wizards set up.

Anyway, it is a great example of what Chris has been talking about over at Mystic Bourgeoisie, America's Toughest to Spell weblog

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Posted by: tigerturf on Mar 4, 2012 7:52:54 PM

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