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Guest post by: Jesse Hopps Become an Author

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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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