Ideas To Help your Business by Using Blogs

Beyond the core concepts of improving your ideas, products, visibility, and team cohesiveness, blogs can improve your business dozens of other ways. Here are a few examples to wet your whistle as we get deeper into exploring blogs.

Improve Customer Loyalty Elisa Camahort is a passionate blogger. She helps theatres in her area, such as 42nd St. Moon (http://42ndstmoon.blogspot.com) by blogging behind-thescenes details, which dedicated theatre-goers love. She also features discounts for theatres to track how effective blogging is at driving new ticket sales. Overall, the ability to connect with their niche audience has been a huge boon for the small theatres that Camahort passionately serves.

Build an Early Buzz Nooked (http://blog.nooked.com/) was first envisioned on the blog, was built on the blog, and has grown through the blog. Nooked is an RSS tracking company—RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and refers to a format used for easily distributing news on the Internet via feeds or channels. At each step of the way, the Nooked blog has been full of inside information that is devoured with abandon by those following the project’s progress. It is the perfect example of how to use blogs to build a buzz early on in a product’s development cycle.

React to Negative Events Earlier this year, General Motors engaged in some major restructuring. GM Chairman Rick Wagoner took a larger degree of control in the company by restructuring selected units so that they reported directly to him—these selected units were previously under the care of such key executives as Bob Lutz. Interestingly, Lutz is the primary author of GM’s exceedingly popular FastLane blogs. Instead of being silent about the event, Lutz was able to turn what many had considered a demotion into a positive thing: he was able to focus entirely on what he loved— product development. Several hundred bloggers and commenters supported his attitude by commenting and followed his example of how to deal with negativity in a public forum.

Extend Your Influence to Your Influencers For many companies, the key to success is knowing who influences the industry. For Microsoft, developers are first priority. To influence developers, Microsoft launched Channel 9 (http://channel9 .msdn.com), which gave a true inside look at the company through daily video profiles of important figures in each product group. The response to this blog and its video angle took everyone at Microsoft by surprise; the blog community grew to more than 50,000 members, making it one of the largest developer communities ever.