Vantage Point: Ideas and advice to improve your marketing

To Blog, Or Not to Blog.

George Dixon, writer

By the time you’ve finished reading this, another 200-to-300 blogs will have joined the 30 million or so already out there. An increasing number of new blogs are being launched by technology companies as marketing tools. Time to jump on the bandwagon?

Maybe, maybe not. The blogosphere is a place of widely inflated hopes and expectations. Dig deep enough and you’ll discover there’s no real business model for turning corporate blogging into a tangible return on investment. However, anecdotal evidence suggests blogs can:

Help establish your company as a thought leader in your industry or market.
Drive traffic to your website.
Increase your company’s visibility on search engines. (Blogs often have wider reach in topics than websites and come up in more searches.)
Help build your brand.
Level the playing field. (Blogs can be used by both small and large companies to communicate with online customer communities.)

I recently talked with Marketing VP Dan Dearing at NextOne, a Maryland-based telecom software company. He recently launched his company’s corporate blog in January and offered the following seven suggestions for would-be corporate bloggers:

Establish metrics that might assess the value of the effort, such as click-throughs to your website, better search engine rankings, increased buzz about your company and products (although this, admittedly, will be hard to measure).
Determine if blogs can 1) support the objectives of your company’s master marketing plan, and/or 2) resolve a marketing/business challenge like establishing thought leadership. Otherwise, blogs are simply a "let's-do-it- because-it's-cool" plaything.
Get participation from different functions and levels. NextOne bloggers include Dearing, who writes about industry happenings, NextOne’s CTO, who focuses on technology, and customer technical support personnel, who write about best practices for using NextOne products.
Know what you’re doing before you start. You and/or your blog team can, for example, attend the growing number of half-day and full-day blog “boot camps” offered by marketing/PR companies and industry analyst firms. Some are offered onsite. The agenda for one such program (offered by Forrester Research) includes:
- Understanding the current state of the blogosphere from corporate and consumer perspectives.
- Building sound, consistent business cases for blogs within your organization.
- Crafting the elements of a corporate blogging policy.
Blog roll. Start reading blogs if you haven’t already and develop a list of favorites. Include links to these blogs on your blogsite, when appropriate, and ask if these bloggers will reciprocate. Your blog roll will mean more click-through traffic to your blogsite and ultimately to your website.
Talk about it whenever and wherever you can. NextOne bloggers never fail to mention the company’s blogsite when they’re in front of customers or speaking at trade shows and seminars.
Don’t expect miracles. NextOne is still working on the metrics end of the blogsite to see if it shortens sales cycles, generates leads, links to new sales, or delivers some other sort of tangible benefit. So far, the evidence is positive but mostly anecdotal. One surprise Dearing notes is how the blog has affected him personally. If you blog and you do it well, you’re forced to stay more current with what’s happening with technology, markets and customers, if for no other reason than just to have something meaningful to say. In other words, blogging can help you do your job better.

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