How Do Blogs Help Your Company?

Someone asked me how blogs help companies, and I've been giving it some thought.

My first response is that it makes me better at my job, and it connects me with others that care about the same things I do. I’ve met a number of passionate, skilled, smart people that I wouldn’t have otherwise, and I’m learning from almost all of them. And in the end, I am more engaged in my own job because of it.

As a marketing manager, I find that my blog helps me stay “on top of the game,” and forces me to focus on a topic I’ve been pondering long enough to write about it. Often, the conversation that follows by other bloggers leads to changing the way I think about things. Ultimately, it’s about being engaged in my field and building a community as much as it is about “attracting customers.”

I started my blog because I believe in the clarity that comes from carefully listening to customers. I believe marketing comes down to understanding customer needs, and creating products or services that meet those needs. The best way to understand what customers need is listening to them. And I’m convinced that really listening (and appropriately responding) leads to a more trusting relationship.

Blogs offer a way to start a conversation. I’m amazed at how much more involved I am in customer issues from the hour or two a day I spend blogging. Most of the time is spent reading what our customers are writing. Because the best blogs are so current, and because they link to other blogs, I find I can easily follow a thread, and get a great deal of information about what everyone’s buzzing about.

Perhaps more importantly, blogs offer a great way of aggregating comments, asking questions, and addressing issues. I’m often amazed at the insight I get on a topic I’m pondering when someone posts a relevant comment.

As a company, I think Microsoft is doing some great things by encouraging technical blogs. Even though we’ve never hired anyone just to blog, blogs are growing organically because it makes it easier for people to share ideas. MSDN blogs are a great way for the tech community to share ideas, tools, even code.

One of the key benefits of blogs is that they connect people as individuals, rather than rely on thinking of customers as an indefinable mass of “users.” Robert’s blog helps me understand the issues our customers are concerned about (good, bad, or otherwise!). And putting a “human face” on Microsoft helps build trust, and hopefully helps customers know that we’re listening.

I’d love to see more product marketing folks like Sean Alexander blogging about products they’re involved in. I think it’s a great way to get the most actively engaged customers insight into upcoming products. It gives us a chance to ask what things customers care about the most. And sometimes they help spread the word about a little-known feature, service pack release, add-on utility, or upcoming event. I learned about Photo Story 2 on Sean’s blog, and got great feedback when I posted the link on my blog.

From a purely internal perspective, I love it when I get a piece of email from someone else in the company—someone I never would have met otherwise—who reads something I wrote that’s helped them with their job. Sometimes it’s a tip about listening to customers, sometimes it’s a book recommendation, sometimes it’s a notice of an upcoming seminar or webcast, sometimes it’s a tip on how to work with a manager or write an employee appraisal.

While I don’t see many “internal only” blogs that are successful, I think they could grow into an effective way for managers to post ongoing instruction to a team, for executives to maintain more of a connection with a large organization, and for technical teams to share details of their work. I also think it could lead to establishing “communities of practice” across the company—ultimately replacing many of the public folders or discussion forums that exist today.

How are blogs helping your company?

Comments

[Kris De Decker]

Blogs help our company in many ways:
-They keep our staff, customers and users informed about the latest and greatest developments in our products.
-They allow developers to quickly highlight specific functionality. Most developers don't like writing helpfiles but they love adding a new blog entry. They can immediately showcase their work and send a link to the interested parties.
-They close sales. Our customers are savy entrepreneurs and all things being equal they will buy from the company that has the most open communication policy. We won our biggest contract of 2003 when the prospect 'discovered' the blogs of our products. Through reading the blogs he concluded that we quickly fixed bugs discovered by customers. Having had problems with his previous supplier he knew that quick bugfixes were critical for keeping his company's ERP application running smoothly.

Blogs also ensure that a company turns it's inner potential energy into outer kinetic energy. If this sounds a little bit newage-ish let me explain. Writing is an essential action for sharing your ideas with other people. I'm not an avid writer but I do believe that written words are the missing link between 'ideas' and 'actions'. So in a certain sense a blog entry is a way to change potential energy (ideas) into kinetic energy (actions). A company where blogging is a way of work there will be a lot of potential energy turned into kinetic energy. Since kinetic energy is the only energy to cause actual change the company will make more things happen than a company that doesn't have an active blogging culture. There is lot of useless blogs out there but just the act of blogging will result in the blogger having a better understanding of the issues involved. Blogging requires self-reflection, people are forced to think about why and what they write. Self-reflection requires changing perspectives and changing perspectives results in a better understanding of the issues involved.
For companies, blogs are 'enablers' because:
-the self-reflection will give the bloggers (employees) a better understanding of themselves and the company
-the blogging process turns ideas into actions and sooner or later these actions will result in more revenues and higher profits
Conclusion: Blogs allow a company to keep stakeholders informed, support employees' development and turn abstract ideas into concrete actions.

[Anne Stanton]

I have both a blog and a web page and I find that I use both in different ways. My blog is a great place for anything date oriented. I have an album of all the old newsletters and a place for posted press releases. I also like to keep the main blog as a running commentary of notes from the field. The web page is like a first date and the blog is for the closer more personal connections. The last thing you want to hear on a first date are the intimate more personal details of someone's life.

www.thenorwichgroup.com and
http://thenorwichgroup.blogs.com

[lori richardson]

I think the big factor is knowledge sharing - sharing a tip or gaining a
new idea that helps you close the gap between where you are and where
YOU want to be - or it does that for the reader. Either way it is a
win. Business blogging is a fast, easy way to get your ideas out to
a worldwide audience - it's like having a world-wide R&D team....

[salman]

dear sir,
i need some tips to presentation on behalf
communication company. how i do better than the
best. please advise. waiting for prompt reply
thanks
salman
m.b.a (erp)