Blogging for customers: Conversations

Blogging for customers.



It sounds kind of like a bad game show, doesn't it.



Put a few business bloggers in a room and let them vote one another off the blog host, based on numbers of references in Technorati, or something like that.



Well, not exactly.



Although, a blog game or reality show might be an idea to consider for the future.



What I am talking about is letting a blog start important conversations with your current and future customers and clients. What better way to build up a business than to talk to the people themeselves.



I know it's considered rather a novel approach to business marketing to let your customers help develop your product line. Letting them help with the marketing process might be even more radical.



In fact, neither is true. It's very mainstream.



We used to know the ideas as customer feedback and complaints on the one hand, and testimonials and word of mouth advertising on the other.



Businesses have thrived on old fashioned viral marketing and talking to their customers for generations. It's just in a new wrapper.



One of the colourful new wrapping papers is the business blog.



Business managements who take the blogging leap of faith, and make no mistake, that's what it truly is for many companies, find an entirely new customer relations and marketing channel.



What is new, however, is often scary for many people.



Concerns immediately arise about "staying on message" and "what about negative feedback" and "can the results be measured quantitatively using known metrics".



After absorbing such objections, the blog can solve all of the problems. I can't say it will eliminate corporate buzzword jargon speak, however.



By writing blog posts, on your industry, your product ideas and processes, your company and its people, some handy business advice, as well as some personal tidbits about your life, the business blog will develop a regular readership audience.



That audience will want to talk to the blog writer. That is the conversation part of the blog. Oh, did I say that the blog needs a commenter for immediate feedback, as well as e-mail contact addresses as well?



If I didn't before, I just did now. Is that efficiency or what!



As the conversations carry on between business and customer, the lines begin to blur in everyone's minds.



The customers begin to feel as if they are part of the company's planning process, and their voices are being heard by company management. They no longer see the company as a faceless corporate them.



The business blogger starts to think of the customers and client as friends and acquaintances, and no longer as numbers on charts, graphs, and computer spread sheets. Instead of numbers, the customers become real flesh and blood people, with familiar names.



In time, the lines blur and fade to such a degree, that business and customers become almost as one.



As partners in the company.



That is the value of business blogs as conversations.