Marketing Ninja

In my previous Blogging for Business articles I covered how blogging can help your business and blogging in a nutshell.

Today we’re going to cover the difference between blogging for your company versus blogging for your customers. This idea of blogging for your business versus your customers is directly related to an old problem that plagues bloggers still today, writing for yourself versus writing for your audience.

Why Many Corporate Blogs Fail

Many corporations create blogs assuming that customers have an innate interest in their products or services; many corporate executives think something along the lines of “oh well we already have tens of thousands of customers, if we create a blog I’m sure they’ll come to read it just to get the latest news on all of our products!”

The reason why the corporate world has been slow to adopt blogging is because of the number of failed corporate blogs is significantly greater than the number of successful ones, largely because those failed corporate blogs were started by people with thick-headed notions like the one I described.

One history lesson that industry never learns is that if you embrace an entirely new technology using the same approaches you used in the last decade, you are going to fail, miserably.

BNET has a great list of why many corporate blogs fail.

Out of all the reasons listed, BY FAR the best way to guarantee that your blog will fail is to write self-aggrandizing infomercials about your products in every post you make on your corporate blog.

When you write your blog solely for promoting your business, rather than for making your customers’ lives easier, you have punched your blog’s ticket. Game over.

Reality Check: What Customers Want to Read on Your Blog

It’s time that we take a reality check before we get your business going on the blogging track. Why would customers want to read your corporate blog?

The answer has nothing to do with your products. Not initially.

Your blog, like any product or services that your company provides, will only work if it helps make the customers’ lives easier. Your blog is supposed to have answers to their questions.

This is where most companies miss the point of blogging. Blogging isn’t just public relations, it’s customer service, and it’s an additional, new information service that your company is providing for its customers.

How to Blog for Your Customers

So let’s get into the right mindset before we start building our corporate blog; here is what your corporate blog should be:

• My corporate blog is an extension of my company’s customer service
• My corporate blog is a resource for gathering feedback on my company’s existing products and services
• My corporate blog is a service provided free of charge to help potential customers find answers to their questions, and to have customers help each other find the answers to their questions
• My corporate blog’s content should be dictated by my customers’ needs

While the end game is to ultimately produce sales from your corporate blog, you are not going to accomplish it by simply writing about your products on your blog. In a later post I am going to describe the proper method for pitching your products and services to potential customers without violating any of the trust you establish with your readers.

Further Reading:

• Why Character Blogs Fail
• Seven Rules for Corporate Blogging
• Ars Technica: Bloggers flog corporate blog – How Dell got it wrong

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