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Successful Blogs Improve Customer Satisfaction

Guest post by: Jesse Hopps

Article Overview: Weblogs or blogs are online journals that can provide business benefits. This new online communication medium comes with risks that require management. Understand the opportunities & risks of corporate blogs before you proceed. Use Demand Metric’s downloadable Blog Policy Template to minimize your risk.

Successful Blogs Improve Customer Satisfaction

Successful Blogs Improve Customer Satisfaction Weblogs or blogs are online journals that can provide business benefits. This new online communication medium comes with risks that require management. Understand the opportunities & risks of corporate blogs before you proceed. Use Demand Metric's downloadable Blog Policy Template to minimize your risk.

What is a Blog?

Historically, blogs have been simple websites used by individuals to document their life experiences. Over the past 12 months, blogs have become a mainstream communication tool leveraged by businesses to enhance customer interactions.

What is the Business Case?

Blogs are very simple and inexpensive to set up and maintain, yet can provide exceptional business benefit. External uses can augment your messages to customers and partners, while internal uses can improve operational efficiency and further leverage your corporate intranet investment.

Types of Blogs:

• External Communications- Bacardi Canada has implemented an effective branded entertainment, multi-channel, campaign centered on their betterthanbeer.com blog. They have integrated outdoor billboards with this medium to connect with their customers with comedic images.
• Customer-to-Customer Networking- Salesforce.com's AppExchange Developer Blog furthers Salesforce's strategic interest in helping application developers share knowledge about their AppExchange on-demand application platform. Gaining the support of application developers is essential to the long-term success of the Salesforce.com's strategic focus on creating a sticky platform. Their blog provides customers with a medium to interact and work through technical difficulties, increasing adoption rates of their platform.
• Internal Communications- many organizations have adopted internal blogs to informally communicate policy decisions, corporate news, or to reinforce & document other management communications.

Blogging Risks:

• Potential to Harm Brand Equity- check out salesforcewatch.com, a 3rd party blog that provides an avenue for upset customers and adversaries with an outlet to comment on service outages.
• Internal Employee Personal Blogs- a policy should be set as employees could leak sensitive corporate information on their personal blogs.
• Difficulty Gaining Consensus on Content- many companies struggle with deciding what to publish and, more importantly, what not to publish, both internally and externally.

Action Plan:

Make a Decision- speak to your business sponsors about the benefits and risks of blogs and determine if it makes sense to leverage this mechanism. Focus on both qualitative (better customer interactions) and quantitative (more web-sales) performance measures.

Identify Uses & Goals- what do you want to get from your blog? Is it going to be used for internal or external communications? What can your blog do to drive revenues? Some blogs are so popular that they are able to sell advertising space on networks like Blogads. As your existing web-infrastructure is already in place, the ROI for blogs that increase revenues can be very strong.

Evaluate Web Infrastructure- only implement a blog if your current web presence is in good shape. Discuss this opportunity with I/T, as they will be involved with software selection and the initial setup of your blog(s).

Create a Blog Policy- use Demand Metric's downloadable Blog Policy Template to help you reduce the risk of litigation from blog content.

Build a Project Plan- determine what additional changes need to be made to your infrastructure. Document the publishing, posting, and QA processes.

Establish Blog Residence- where will your blog reside? If customer facing, it will likely be on your website. An alternative would be to set up a completely separate website just for this purpose. On the internal side, consider your intranet or a portal page that business users often go to.

Select a Scalable Software Platform- look at vendors like Drupal, iUpload's Customer Conversation System, Roller, Six Apart's Movable Type and TypePad, Telligent Systems' Community Server, Traction Software's TeamPage, UserLand Software's Manila, and WordPress.

Set up a Test Environment- many users will be afraid to blog if they don't have a safe environment to write.

Monitor Quality Assurance- as blogs are informal in nature, it is common for writers to forget about the importance of grammar and spelling.

Create Posting Schedule- initially, you should see a spike of activity, as new users will want to add their two cents to the blog. Make sure you have a regular posting schedule, monthly, weekly, or even daily, to keep content fresh.

Bottom-Line:

Effective blogging can have a positive impact on your relationship with your customers, and improve internal communications. Select the right blogging strategy to augment your overall marketing message, and be conscious of the risks that third-party blogs represent.

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Article Tags: business benefits, communication medium, customer satisfaction, metrics, online journals, policy template, weblogs



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Re: Top 50 Lists - Hi Evan, How about "Top 50": -Inventor Blogs To Watch -Franchising Blogs To Watch -Business Book Review Blogs -Women Entrepreneur Blogs -Young Entrepreneur Blogs
RSS explained - Hi Takuya, Many thanks for the indepth explantion. If I understand it right, it is mainly for the use of 'Blogs'. You refer to the use connected to 'Blogs. What about websites. Is there a benefit, too? Kindest regards Beat "Unlock People's Potentials!"
Re: Two Useful Books To Help You Focus On The CLIENT - Hi David, To add to your thread, I'd like to recommend Jonathan Tisch's "Chocolates On The Pillow Aren't Enough: Reinventing The Customer Experience". Tisch's book includes content on "Welcoming Customers", "The New Art of Customization", "The Challenges of Customer Diversity" and "Offering Something Extra to Your Customers" to name a few.
Re: Some attractive terms in advertisement - [quote="lane_hug":sqdmyojl]Some terms can make the advertisement look more attractive, like unlimited, free, life time guarantee, and more. These should be definitely incorporated to ensure fast sales.[/quote:sqdmyojl] You've got to be careful with such terms, though. Take as an example the poor Korean dry cleaners who had the words "Satisfaction guaranteed" on their storefront window. They lost (supposedly) a pair of slacks from some loony judge, who proceeded to sue them for MILLIONS of dollars (over a $100 pair of slacks) because they did not provide him with satisfaction. [If the sign had said "Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back" perhaps none of it would have happened...] These days more and more people are apt to sue at the drop of a hat, and if you promise them something even though common sense says you wouldn't have meant what you said (for example Pepsi got in trouble because their commercial for Pepsi points, at the time the movie True Lies came out, featured a Harrier jet as in the movie. A few looney businessmen bought up all the points the could to get that jet, although they were told it had just been dramatic license, and ended up suing Pepsi for misleading advertising. The suit was dismissed, but the fact that the guy was able to find lawyers who'd even take the case on is scary. To cut a long story short, be careful what terms you use, and think to yourself what you'd have to do if people took them literally.
Re: What's 1 word to describe what your business will be in 2012 - Successful.


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