ChristophDollis.com » Blogging

The Positive Impact of Blogs in Corporate Marketing to People

Christoph Dollis — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 12:24:10 +0000

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:

Your internet reputation matters.

If customers are writing bad things about you, know about it.

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.

Don’t fight with bloggers; they’ll just post the cease and desist letter and now you’re the bully.

Instead, do what you’d do ordinarily — engage your upset customers and solve the problem.

Get them to write that you’ve done so. Honey, not vinegar…

Not all people blogging about your company is bad by any stretch of the imagination. Make friends with people saying good things.

As for you and/or your employees blogging, do: Openness humanizes you and your company.

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.

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.

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.

Want more on these topics? Browse the archive of posts filed under: Blogging, Marketing, Videos by Others.

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© 2007-2007 Christoph Dollis Enterprises. Moral Rights Asserted.

I’ve Installed WordPress, Finally. Perseverance or Stubbornness?

Christoph Dollis — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 13:09:52 +0000

I vote for the latter.

I initially wasn’t able to find the right way to convert my personally crafted web design into a WordPress (open source blogging software) theme… and now I have. While this blog is new, it was always my goal to use WordPress because it gives me more ability to customize and enhance it.

Plus WordPress produces “valid code” meeting web standards. I’d previously taken the time to write my hand coded (home page, contact page, etc.) pages XHTML 1.0 Strict and it annoyed the heck out of me to go to validate my source code produced by Blogger and find 277 validation errors in it.

I like it. Blogger was good. It’s what got me interested in web design in the first place as opposed to merely writing, which I’ve always enjoyed. This has much better features.

Want more on these topics? Browse the archive of posts filed under: Blogging, Success, Web Design.

ChristophDollis.com Sales Pro
The place to come for more appointments, more people in the door, and more sales!(sm)
© 2007-2007 Christoph Dollis Enterprises. Moral Rights Asserted.

Professional Sales Defined in an Unlikely Place

Christoph Dollis — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 05:43:00 +0000

I was doing some research on commenting systems for blogs, after temporarily not finding the correct way to turn my new hand coded website design into a WordPress theme.

UPDATE Monday September 23rd: Successfully installed WordPress. Post continues from original date…

I’ve been putting thought into that one off and on for a few days and get error after error.

Well, to console myself I entered a few search strings into Google. I read about the different problems people have with comment databases using software hosted on their own servers.

I was reading one post by Loren at Incremental Blogger, a business tech blog. Loren’s comments stopped working in July of ’06. When I tried to leave a comment today, they’re still broken — over one year later!

The reason I wanted to comment and ended up sending Loren an email instead is because I came across this gem:

Would you convince a friend to buy a computer that’s cool but not what they really need?

“There are some good suggestions in the currently posted 243 comments in the thread, however, a vast majority of them are posted more to advocate a particular product that respond to what the original poster is looking for. Come on folks. Is this really the way to do things?”

Read the whole article.

Loren makes a fantastic point.

In the entire thread, very few comments are addressed to what is in the best interests of the student who needs a computer to do certain specific tasks related to his education.

Instead, people chime in with all sorts of software and hardware solutions that have worked for them, but don’t take into consideration the fact the student does different types of work.

So they end up being confusing rather than persuasive.

Yet these same people, trying to be helpful, would be offended if they went into a computer or furniture store with a picture in their mind of what they wanted and were instead giving reams of data about the salesperson’s preference.

But this is exactly what happens all too often, isn’t it?

However, a few questions in that thread… good questions… about the student’s experiences with owning a computer, plans, and desires would have narrowed choices down. This would have left the commentator in a position to make a persuasive recommendation.

This recommendation, based on knowledge of the customer, would have given the commentator leverage to explain why the student should expand their budget if necessary to get the right solution.

Want more on these topics? Browse the archive of posts filed under: Blogging, Questions, Sales Techniques, Sales Theory.

Last (Yeah, Right!) Technical Challenge

Christoph Dollis — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 11:31:00 +0000

Google Blogger has no way of publishing recent comments, properly sorted, in the sidebar for anyone who uses their own website design as a template.

The “New Blogger” supports this, but I like keeping my own style (such as it is).

So what I’ve done is created a second Blogger blog, had Blogger forward my comments from my main “real” blog to my Google Gmail address, and, from there, Gmail forwards them to my new Blogger blog’s publish-by-email feature and automatically publishes them as if they were posts.

Then, I grab the RSS xml feed “feed” from that blog, run it through a Javascript called “Hearsay” developed by Greg from Freshblog, and voila, recent comments.

Brilliant solution.

Alas, I am not an expert with Javascript and the dates are giving an error, which is why you may see something like:

Commentator Name (just now) on Blog Post’s Title:

Text of the comment…

… and a tool tip error when you hover over it if you really pay attention.

Not quite the effect I was looking for. So let’s see if the fine fellow from Melbourne who wrote the script a year ago as a public service will still support it.

He helped someone else out 5-days ago, so I am crossing my fingers!

UPDATE 7:54 AM: Greg replied from the other side of the world almost immediately and helped me fix the problem. I wanted to drop the dates and wasn’t sure how. Thanks.

UPDATE Monday September 23rd: I migrated to WordPress.

Want more on these topics? Browse the archive of posts filed under: Blogging, Web Design.