Stephen Baker at BusinessWeek writes The business blog backlash is nigh. Well, that’s cause many people got into blogging for the wrong reasons.
They got in cause it was hot PR wise. Or they got in because they were goaded to by bloggers. Or they got in cause they were promised more traffic than showed up.
Those are the wrong reasons to blog your business.
What’s the right reasons?
1) Have a scalable way to talk to your most passionate customers.
2) Build better Google rank for your business.
3) Find ways to make your business/product/team better. Customers, if they know you’re listening, will send you all sorts of ideas and bug reports. Minutes ago Jeffrey Czerniak, for instance, blogged a bug with Microsoft Paint. I’ll make sure the right team sees that and improves their product.
4) As a way to pull customers into your company which makes them feel more a part of it, and gives them stories that they can tell their friends. That’s why Channel 9 works so well. I really don’t care if millions of people visit. I care that folks like Mary Jo Foley or Joe Wilcox or Chris Pirillo or CreamHackered over on Neowin or Bob Stein over on ActiveWin (there are thousands of people like this, each of which have an influential audience) have a new way to learn about what we’re doing.
See, lots of corporate types try to get a big audience. They think that big is important. It’s not. To me, it’s about scale. If I get the right 40 people I can launch another ICQ. That went out to just 40 people on November 1, 1996. In six weeks it had gotten to 65,000. Within a few years it had 100 million downloads. All through word-of-mouth.
So, CEOs, if you don’t get blogging, that’s OK. It gives guys like me who are seven levels down from the CEO something to do. 🙂
Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.
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