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Heddon Communications
Over twenty years of marketing communications & PR experience |
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Do you Blog for your business?
It wasn’t long ago that the word “blog” hadn’t been invented. And even when blogs did first appear, they were for ‘sados’ who had nothing better to do with their time than keep an online diary.
But as is so often the case in the electronic world, blogs have moved on apace and are now ignored by businesses at their peril.
There have always been diary writers, such as Samuel Pepys, and Mr ‘angry from Balham’ who commentated on current life and burning issues of the day in the newspapers. The letters pages of the national newspapers have been a good source of a cross section of views by the wider public on a host of different topics.
Sometimes these views were about businesses and their activities, but the publications often had a short shelf life or a limited audience and the views could be influenced by positive pro-active marketing campaigns.
With the advent of the internet and the opening up of global communications on an unprecedented scale, views and opinions can be disseminated to the four corners of the world at the click of a mouse. This makes the consumer or customer more powerful than ever before.
Blogging started as nothing much more than an online diary, but it has developed into an online forum, a source of views and opinions, and a space for people to ‘sound off’ about a burning issue.
Picture the disgruntled customer, who is dissatisfied with a product or service they have received. Perhaps he has been to stay in a hotel and had a poor experience – the experience might not even have been the hotel’s fault. When he gets home he lets off steam on his own blog on his own web site, perhaps joins in a discussion blog about hotels on someone else’s web site or posts a critique on a hotel directory site. If his comments attract further attention, others might add their comments until the particular web site becomes very busy with lots of traffic. Inevitably this pushes the site up in the search engines.
Now, along comes another potential customer carrying out some research as to where to stay. He types in the name of the hotel and the top reference is the web site with the critical blog comments. Reading the comments he will probably decide not to stay there!
Roll this scenario out into your own business. How often do your prospective clients or customers find out about you through research on the internet. Do you know if there are blogs out there saying negative things about you? Does a blog about you appear high in the search engines?
I have been working with a client recently who had some unjustified negative comments on a blog. It was affecting their business and probably losing them customers. We set about pro-actively responding to the negative comments, tracking lots of different sites to make sure there was always a response and encouraging the bloggers to change their views.
The sites went quiet again after a while, but it left us reflecting on the power and scope of today’s bloggers. The information they were posting could potentially be read anywhere in the world; anyone could contribute and anyone could say whatever they wanted. It is hard to sue someone on the other side of the world just for expressing a personal opinion. Bigger web sites, such as the social networking sites, will remove offensive and inaccurate postings, but there are many millions of other sites that are much harder to control.
The internet is still really in it’s infancy as far as how it will change marketing activities for businesses. There is greater power in the hands of the customer than there has ever been. Of course it would be easy to say, always provide a top level service and you will never have unhappy customers becoming bloggers, but unfortunately business life isn’t always like that!!
Sue Heddon
Heddon Communications
01344 752093
sue@heddoncommunications.co.uk
www.heddoncommunications.co.uk
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