Rob Neppel, President of Kithbride (kith as in Middle English friends, neighbours, or relatives, and bridge as in connection), a company which specializes in modern media relations, reveals some pointers on how blogging can both harm and help your profitability.

As with all things, the devil is in the details.

After watching that interview, I took home 11 points:

1. Your internet reputation matters.
2. If customers are writing bad things about you, know about it.
3. Blogging is an online social phenomenon. While some negative reviews might not be worth doing anything about because of the popularity of the author’s blog, others can spread like a wildfire causing wide scale havoc.
4. Don’t fight with bloggers; they’ll just post the cease and desist letter and now you’re the bully.
5. Instead, do what you’d do ordinarily — engage your upset customers and solve the problem.
6. Get them to write that you’ve done so. Honey, not vinegar…
7. Not all people blogging about your company is bad by any stretch of the imagination. Make friends with people saying good things.
8. As for you and/or your employees blogging, do: Openness humanizes you and your company.
9. Set clear and reasonable limits on confidential and trade information, but a bit of info about your workplace lets your prospects and customers picture you as real people, like them.
10. Leading edge companies encourage their employees or trusted key people to blog. Large companies (think Microsoft) have blogging initiatives. While maybe only a small percentage of customers might actually read a given post, often media will check your blog when writing a story about you giving you free publicity.
11. Give them something to write about — you know how media likes to fill in the blanks!

One thing he didn’t mention that I think is important is the comment or “opinion” section on blogs. The only people likely to actually leave a comment on a corporate blog might be the hard core mavens. These are people who are especially knowledgeable and interested in your company or its products and services. You want to know what these people are thinking.

A good example is Ivory soap. You’ve seen the message:

Questions?
1-800-395-9960

It’s soap! Who has questions? Obviously those people who care enough to think about the difference in either price, features, or quality. This particular phone number on a package is known is in marketing-speak a “maven trap”.

It gives a company the opportunity to know what the people who care most about their products and services think. And this is valuable because combined with a few other personality types like connectors, those with wide social circles, and salespeople, charismatic persuasive powerful types, this can cause the popularity of your offering to take off in unexpected ways.

Steady repeat predictable sales are good, but… you’d probably agree are much nicer when you’re dealing with more sales and a hot market. In other words, a trend.

I’m more focussed on making sales than actual marketing itself, but a really good book you may have heard of that has these concepts is “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell. You can pick up a copy at my Amazon Associate store or just at your local bookstore.

His ideas together with Kithbridge’s blogging concepts could enhance each other.

By Christoph Dollis at 5:24 AM on Saturday October 27th, 2007, and filed under Blogging, Marketing, Videos by Others.

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