Blog as virtual lunch
Posted on December 31, 2007 by Martin Zagorsek
It feels a little self-referential to write about blogs as a business tool in a blog that’s, well, ultimately meant to be a business tool. But with the NYT blessing the concept of using blogs to help generate business, I couldn’t resist.
Most of the business-related blogs I’ve come across seem to have two main goals. The first is to raise awareness of the underlying business, both by organic search traffic - Google loves blog content - and later on by getting other bloggers (and ultimately mainstream press) to link to and/or quote the blog. For service-oriented businesses (e.g. lawyers and their “blawgs“), the other goal is often to demonstrate expertise, hopefully to convince visitors that the bloggers know their stuff and are worth hiring to help with whatever type of problems they might have.
All of this is well and good, but I think it misses an important point. One of the biggest advantages of the blog compared to other marketing media is its ability to convey the personality of the blogger. You can adopt a much more informal tone in a blog, without seeming unprofessional (or fake-folksy), than you ever could in traditional marketing materials such as a web site or whitepaper.
In service businesses, the client’s level of comfort with the people they’ll be working with is often at least as important as their expertise. Small service firms have a dilemma - people who don’t know them won’t hire them, but they don’t have the time (or access) to make personal impressions on the bulk of their target market. The blog allows a potential client to at least get a first impression of the personalities of the people they’d be hiring - are they too serious? Too goofy? Too techie? Not techie enough?
In an ideal world, our networking efforts would be more than enough to fill our pipelines. In the later stages of some firms’ evolution, that often becomes the case. But for those of us who aren’t quite there yet, hopefully our blogs will introduce us to a few extra people we wouldn’t have had a chance to meet over lunch.
Sphere: Related Content» Filed Under Word of Mouth
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