A lot of businesses have made the initial move online with some sort of company website however few have made the leap into the blogosphere. Hopefully by the end of this post you will see the benefit of maintaining a blog for your company.
First let me introduce you to the elephant in the room that is Social Media. The internet has changed the way we communicate from emails to IMs but within that last couple of years we've started to see communities of people emerge from the interweb. These communities encourage a whole new train of thought as to how we interact and ultimately trust each other. Social Media marketing involves giving back to the community in hopes that people will ultimately look to you for answers to industry specific questions. Now there are a couple of ways to accomplish this.
First there are Social Networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Plaxo where anyone can join an online community and immediately connect to thousands if not millions of other users. Within these communities you'll tend to see alot of guerilla marketing and spamming while people try and make their brand known. The successful social media marketers are the ones who only give positive feedback to other people's questions and ultimately become a resource to the community. Its all about establishing yourself and your company as leaders and experts within your field.
Another popular approach is through Social Bookmarking sites. These dynamic directories of information change based on the general consensus of the greater population. To have your company, or blog post, featured on the front page of one of these sites is guaranteed traffic in your companies direction.
Now both of these social media marketing approaches work on their own however there is one key component missing that helps retain your online following, your blog. A blog is pretty much an online journal where you are putting out information into the web. There are popular blog directories and indexing sites that will take your blogs RSS feed and share it with the rest of the world. The great thing about RSS feeds is that they are cross media ready. They allow for people to easily subscribe to your blog so they can view it with their favorite feed aggregator, wethere it be online, on their desktop, or on their phone. Over time you will see your subscriber base grow and as a result more business opportunities will begin to unfold.
Now the key thing about blogging it to be sure you are putting out quality, on topic, content and that you post regularly. This may seem like quite a chore but in reality it should only take up a half hour of your day.
One concern many companies have about blogging is how to control unwanted comments on their blog. Well, ultimately you can delete these entries however i would consider addressing them. This could be a great opportunity to clear the air on a touchy topic within your industry.
What you are doing is putting a face to your company. Your giving your company an existence that can act and react and it will give your business the human touch that social media revolves around.
Please feel free to comment, rant or complain and I'll be glad to converse with you :)
