<p>The social media are booming. YouTube, FaceBook, LinkedIn, Flickr, MySpace, and blogs have become popular. Blogs’ visibility during the 2004 presidential election helped bring social media to the forefront. Blogs met a communications need, the technology got easier to use, and now they are exploding.<br /><br />Social media are unquestionably important to marketers. How they fit into our businesses’ communications is another question. <br /><br />Whether you are Microsoft or the corner store, your business is about relationships. Marketing exists to create, support, and further relationships with your customers, shareholders, potential employees, and prospective clients. So do the social media.<br /><br />Blogging in particular offers a place for an individual human voice to enter the realm of corporate communications. It’s pretty radical, when you think about it. We have gone from a few “trusted” sources of information to countless voices speaking on their own authority. With this shift, the corporate voice is also becoming an aggregate of individual voices. While this has always been true, now it is more transparent.<br /><br />Blogs show tantalizing promise for professional services marketing, offering readers direct insight into the writer’s ideas, values, and personality. Blogs can build relationships, they can position the author as a thought leader, and they can enhance a personal brand. While nothing will replace personal contact, blogs offer businesses another way to create relationships with their target audiences.<br /><br />Blogs are built for conversation. They are all about opinions. The most successful have a personal, authentic, and often quirky voice. This makes them fun to read, engaging. It gives them personal credibility and authority . . . as one person’s opinion. <br /><br /> “Blogs generally fail due to content,” say my notes from a Webinar on Web 2.0. That’s why blogs used for corporate news releases, event announcements, or online brochures generally don’t work. Although blog technology works well for a corporate mouthpiece, the spirit of blogging runs against it.<br /><br />When it comes to blogs, many of our ideas about business writing go out the window. What most consider “professional” business writing—neutral, formal, impersonal, and the corporate “we”—won’t work for a blog. The personal opinions and transparency inherent in successful blogs seem to be at odds with company communication policies designed to avoid controversy. <br /><br />In professional services marketing—particularly the design and construction industry—we are still finding out how blogs apply. As with many new technologies, social media began as, well, social phenomena. Their popularity and reach now force us to consider the implications for our businesses. <br /><br />Because professional service marketing promotes ideas and relationships, we have a great opportunity to use blogs strategically: set your firm apart just by having a blog; distinguish your company as a specialist in your niche; discuss the learning curve in green building, or emerging developments in solar technology. The possibilities are endless.<br /><br />Once a company decides to start a blog, you’ll need an author or a handful of authors who will commit to writing regular posts. Define the blog’s focus, give it a name, and outline possible topics. Anticipate conflicting deadlines, and write a few posts ahead of time to have on hand. Clarify any internal review process needed before posting an entry, or for publishing comments received. Put a link on your web site, and start spreading the word.<br /></p>
2008-12-06T04:58:58Z
2008-12-09T21:45:28Z
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its-not-walter-cronkites-world-any-more-why-blogs-matter-to-professional-service-marketing
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2008-12-09T21:43:17Z
2008-12-09T21:43:17Z
Social media are unquestionably important to marketers. How they fit into our businesses’ communications is another question.
It’s not Walter Cronkite’s world any more - Why blogs matter to professional service marketing
0
2009-02-24T09:47:44Z