Posts Tagged ‘communication’

Last week I outlined what a blog is, and began to look at why a business should invest time in developing, writing and promoting their own blog. Here I want to look at 6 key reasons why your company needs to blog:

1. Gathering Feedback - A blog can serve as an essential communication channel with your customers. Customers feedback, critiques, praises and complaints can prove invaluable. How much would you be prepared to spend on customer opinion polls, surveys and focus groups? A blog is a cost-effective way to listen to your customer feedback.

2. Clearer Communication - How would your business deliver relevant, up-to-date messages regarding events in your business or market to a broad audience, instantly? A blog helps you attract new customers and offer a personal touch to your communications with existing customers.

3. Google loves a blogger! - A blog can form a cost-effective, measurable solution to gaining higher rankings in the major search engines. Google loves relevant, updated, ever-changing content - the essence of a good blog, plus, if you’re talking about your market and business, your blog is naturally keyword heavy. (your talking about your products/services/industry after all, right?)

4. Blog for your staff - You value your customers feedback, thoughts and complaints, but how about your most valuable asset: your employees? Offering a channel for airing staff views and offering a virtual ‘water-cooler’ for your staff to discuss ideas, what’s working and what’s not, can provide direct feedback and it can help keep staff motivated and feeling valued.

5. Stay ahead of the competition - A blog allows you to demonstrate your industry expertise. Striking up conversations with potential and existing customers may well set you apart from your dull corporate competitor. If your competitors aren’t blogging, who are your customers listening to?

6. Extend your brand - Don’t just give your company a voice, how about a personality? A blog gives you the opportunity to talk to your customers in whatever accent you choose. The ethos of your company can be projected in the way you communicate, and what you choose to communicate about. A blog gives you the chance to further build on your brand.

Bonus 7. It’s the way you tell ‘em - Say what you want to say, when you want to say it - a blog allows unedited views, announcements or statements without being at the mercy of press editors. Press publications rarely tell it as you see it, so why aren’t you?

So, I believe these are among the most compelling reasons that your business has to join the on-line conversation, but the road to blogging bliss is crawling with considerations: who will write your blog? What will it be about? How often should you blog? Will it be hosted by yourself? Do we moderate comments? And more…

Of course, [warning: blatant service offering ahead] bpodr would be happy to help you implement your new blogging strategy, or just talk you through your options.

RSS stands for really simple syndication. So, you know that RSS is all about syndication, and that it is simple - really simple - but what does it mean to you and your business, and more importantly: why should you or your business care?

RSS is a format for delivering regularly changing web content¹ directly to those people who want it. Web content could be your company’s latest news, blog posts or your new product range - whatever content your customers may be interested in hearing about. RSS feeds allow web users to automate the task of checking their favourite websites for updates - the updates are delivered straight to them. (for more on how feeds work and how you can use them, the BBC has a great section on it here)

More important than the technology is what it can mean to your business; you can deliver news and information quickly (in seconds), cheaply (for free) and easily (the click of a mouse) to those who want to hear what you have to say. RSS feeds are allowing people to control exactly what they read and when they read it. If your customers want to hear from you, how are you helping them?

RSS allows you to reach hundreds/thousands/millions of your customers in seconds, and not just any customers, but fully qualified ‘I’ve signed up to your RSS feed to learn more about what you have to say‘-type customers. And they’re your favourite type. (right?)

In a future post I’ll look at how you can use RSS as an effective communication tool (and point out some companies who are already benefiting from it). If you would like to read more about RSS feeds and other web technologies that can help your business why not subscribe to our RSS feed? you’ll find our feed to the right of this post (click that pretty orange button), and you’ll find a list of RSS readers here.

¹ WhatisRSS.com