On Monday, I was the keynote speaker at the Blogging for Business Conference in Salt Lake City. The room was filled mostly with marketing and media professionals, with some business owners - who all had some big questions about blogging.
At the forefront of everyone’s mind were a few key business blogging questions:
- How can you keep control of your brand with a blog, social media & user-generated content?
- How do you use a blog to build your brand?
- How do you measure the effectiveness of social media on your bottom line?
Hefty questions indeed.
And unfortunately, there aren’t clean cut answers. Books could be written about each - but I’ll dedicate an article to answering each of them over the next couple of weeks.
How Can You Keep Control of Your Brand with a Blog & Social Media?
The short answer? You can’t control the conversation anymore.
Social media has permanently changed the way consumers interact with brands - both online and offline. No longer are people willing to sit back and be fed a marketing strategy - consumers now demand conversation and interaction with the companies they do business with.
The good news? Companies willing to be transparent and that engage their audience are winning - both offline and online. And it’s not just consumers that are rewarding companies for engaging their audience. Search engines are at the forefront of pushing social media in front of internet users.
For example, let’s take a common question asked by new mothers, “getting baby to take medicine”. Here’s a screen capture of the first 4 pages of results:
As you can see - the first and second results are from Berkley.edu and BabyCenter.com respectively. Social network Minti comes in at #3 and my own blog eMoms at Home comes in at #4 - this is because the company that creates a new baby medicine dispensing product called “Reliadose” provided some free products to give away to our site visitors.
Ironically, I really don’t think that my site should have ranked that well for the phrase “getting baby to take medicine”. We run a home business blog - I think these answers would actually be better answered elsewhere, although admittedly the article in question did provide an answer that the searcher was looking for. But this doesn’t change the fact that Google ranks blogs so well in the search results that we rank highly even if in the big picture, there might be a more relevant result.
Let me make this simple:
Your customers have questions.
Blogs and social networks are providing the answers.
If your company or brand isn’t blogging or engaging with your customers via social media, then you aren’t controlling your brand.
You may have fears about comments, complaints, or difficult questions your customers have for you and your company. But the conversation about you is happening online, whether or not you are participating.
Customers don’t expect perfection - customers expect honest communications from businesses that conduct business in a trustworthy manner. Random unfounded criticisms won’t stand the test of social media - consumers are smarter than that. But if you are afraid of having open conversations with your customers, having a blog is not the problem you should be dealing with - instead you should be focusing on the products or services that are not delivering what your customers are expecting.
In the end, a strong brand and a strong business will either engage their audience with blogs and social media, or they will be left behind.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 8:17 pm and is filed under Social Media, Web Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.8 Responses to “How Can You Keep Control of Your Brand with a Blog & Social Media?”
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October 26th, 2007 at 10:41 am
[…] The conversation about you is happening online, whether or not you are participating. - Wendy Piersall on How Can You Keep Control of Your Brand with a Blog & Social Media? […]
October 29th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Hi Wendy,
Great to see Minti get a mention
We (Minti) gets a lot of traffic from the long tail searches as you noticed above.
By the way looks like Minti is now placed 2nd for that search term and this blog post is placed 5th already!
The power of blogs etc.
Kindest
Clay Cook
Minti Co-Founder
October 29th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Blogs and social networking tools are becoming increasingly important as people gain more options for building a brand for their company – and a personality! – online. It’s interesting how “personal” and “professional” are blending more as new tools get developed for entrepreneurs and sites like Facebook and Myspace start to open up business opportunities. I think being much more “personal” than before is becoming really important to developing stronger relationships with clients, and I notice this particularly in the computer consulting field in which I work.
October 30th, 2007 at 7:27 am
Blogs aren’t about control
It’s tempting to think that you are in charge of your business. It might even look like you’re the one calling all the shots. What we often fail to remember, however, is that, at most, we control just one thing. . .ourselves. We are respond…
October 30th, 2007 at 9:48 am
Thanks for this insight into both the risks and importance of blogs and social networking.
Question for you: do you know of a resource for marketers that can help us reach out to relevant, trusted and opinion-leader-type blogs? Beyond technorati….
November 1st, 2007 at 1:26 am
[…] How Can You Keep Control of Your Brand with a Blog & Social Media? | Inspired Business Growth Wonderful post with a pithy summary. You cannot control the conversation any more. If you are not blogging then customers will increasingly get the answers elsewhere. (tags: socialmedia brand2.0 blogging wendypiersall conversational+marketing) […]
November 6th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
[…] . in her post, You’re Asking The Wrong Question, Valeria continued the conversation begun by Wendy about the issue that many marketers have - "How can you keep control of your brand with a […]
November 27th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
When I read your comment -
In the end, a strong brand and a strong business will either engage their audience with blogs and social media, or they will be left behind.
I immediately thought of the day in 1998, almost 10 years ago, when I read something very similar online in The Industry Standard -
Organizations that believe in what they’re doing - and are fearless enough to project that perspective online - could win unimagined loyalty. But corporations can’t credibly communicate what they don’t comprehend. Passion, commitment, engagement, humanity - qualities highly valued in this medium - are simply missing from most commercial Web sites. The audience is listening - for a heartbeat. Companies that haven’t got one are about to flatline in the Web marketplace.
This was my first exposure to Chris Locke, http://www.rageboy.com/, who would soon be one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as usual http://www.cluetrain.com/book.html .
“Markets are conversations” Yup…these guys got it…back when Web 2.0 was just a distant gleam in the headlights of the cyber highway. So maybe it’s taken a while for the world to catch up…and yeah maybe companies are still deer in those headlights…but every day, in every way we’re saying - welcome to the conversation.
Ann Wendell
Nurse Talent Scout
Swedish Medical Center
ann.wendell@swedish.org
www.swedish.org/referralreward