Blogging to create brand awareness
In my last blog, I argued that blogs within the social media marketing mix – among others – aims at creating brand awareness. As you know, brand awareness can be achieved through various tools : traditional media, press releases, the organization of events, product placement and sponsoring to name just a few.
Blogging can be a (low-cost) solution in reaching out to potential customers, business partners or suppliers to create brand awareness that may come back to the organization in the forms of goodwill, customer loyalty and increased revenues.
How to avoid corporate blogging of firing back
Yet, what sets blogs apart from the aforementioned media is the possibility to obtain feedback. Feedback allow readers of the blog to comment on a post and these comments in turn are open to the public. Furthermore, readers of a corporate blog may very well be blogging about the subject at hand themselves – otherwise, they would not be interested in the blog in the first place. This means that what is written on a corporate blog is very likely to be picked up and commented in the blogosphere at large – for better or worse. Some simple, basic rules apply when blogging on a corporate blog. Without wanting to go too much into detail – corporate blogs should definitively avoid topics that incite controversy or be founded in partisan politics.
Using feedback strategically
Blog feedback and commenting capacities come as a double edge sword - while they allow to engage into a productive discussion with your public, they can also receive open criticism from those not agreeing with your point of view. Yet there is no need to fear reactions coming from the blogosphere. Instead, feedback can be embraced as a God-send tool allowing the instauration of a sense of community, helping to improve customer goodwill and may even be strategically used to contribute to product development!
In this context, it will be useful to talk about ‘corporate philosophy’ and how the latter will influence how blogs will be used by the organization. Roughly, we can divide corporate blog philosophies into three main orientations – giving way to three main ‘corporate blog strategies’. Each of the following corporate blog strategies will tell us something about a company’s communication philosophy and will hence define the editorial strategy of the corporate blog:
1. Thought Leadership
2. Openness and Transparency
3. Customers feedback & ideas
This classification is the fruit of an extensive corporate blogging survey established in 2005 by Backbonemedia (www.backbonemedia.com) on which I would like to comment on below. Each of these philosophies not only represents a ‘choice of blogging strategy’ that an organization should make prior to begin corporate blogging, but it also indicates a path that may lead the organization to a change of corporate culture where it crosses the so-called ‘corporate blogging cultural divide’ to realize all of the benefits and opportunities blogging presents when exchanging within the blogosphere:
Backbonemedia: Crossing the corporate blogging cultural divide
For further reading, please click here to access the ‘Strategy’ page on this blogsite.
