Subscribe Did a colleague forward this newsletter? Sign up to receive your own copy. News IQPC Workshop, co-presenting with Larry Bodine: Proving ROI on Marketing by Measuring Marketing Effectiveness. September 26, New York City. Event brochure. Branding: Let’s not get fooled (again)!, (PDF) co-authored by Suzanne Lowe and Larry Bodine for The Marketer, June 2006 Measuring ROI for Marketing Efforts, by Suzanne Lowe and Larry Bodine, Accounting and Financial Planning for Law Firms, June 2006 Advice for Firms in Need of a Better Way to Measure Their ROI (PDF), IOMA Law Office Management and Adminstration Report. Versions of this article also appeared in IOMA's Contractor's Business Management Report and Design Principal's Report, June 2006. (© IOMA) New from the Expertise Marketplace Blog Clients in Control A rare public look at one firm's marketing strategy Quality is your best salesperson Become a real live superhero Pay attention to shifts in advertising and PR strategies When your expert's book is panned From caveat emptor to caveat venditor Let's get small Is professional services marketing broken? Money's pouring in; why are these people crying? Professional firm CMOs: unprepared for their roles? Diversifying professional services -- folly or genius? Are innovation and professional services incompatible? BW's Global Brands Rankings See all the posts at the Expertise Marketplace blog Subscribe to the blog's RSS feed for regular updates. (Need RSS help?) Recent Issues The State of Cross-Selling in Professional Service Firms, July 2006 Targeting and Segmentation in Professional Service Firms, June 2006 Measuring Your Top Marketing Strategies, May 2006 You can order Marketplace Masters from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, your favorite online bookseller, or CEO-READ.

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Blogging for Business

Did you know that there are now 50 million blogs? That 175,000 blogs are started every day? That 7,200 are created every hour? Those are the findings of the latest “State of the Blogosphere” report from Technorati, the blogging industry’s watchdog. With these numbers, it’s no surprise that many of my professional services clients are asking questions about the appropriateness of deploying blogs as part of their marketing programs.

Debbie Weil, the “Mona Lisa” of corporate blogging, has this to say:

“As a marketing strategy, blogs are often more effective than traditional Web sites. Blogging is a powerful, low-cost way to get found by the search engines – one of the biggest reasons marketers are paying increasing attention. Prevailing wisdom goes something like this: get found in Internet search results and your voice will count. Be absent online and your company, product or service (unless you’re a Fortune 500 brand with a mega marketing budget) practically doesn’t exist.”

Debbie’s remarks echo the comments of well-respected social media gurus (notably Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, BL Ochman and Steve Rubel) who urge us to recognize the sea-change underway in how buyers sift and exchange information.

Until lately, most professional services marketers have been waiting and watching, believing that blogs are a “not for us” or at least a “not yet” marketing vehicle. But things are changing rapidly – more CEOs are starting blogs, and an increasing number of successful companies are using them as an interactive communication vehicle.

Accordingly, our traditional August guest-authored issue features a writer who provides us with the latest insights on the marketing revolution that blogging and other social media represent – yes, even for professional service firms!

This month’s article is adapted from the first chapter of Debbie’s new book, The Corporate Blogging Book. Debbie has made the complete first chapter available as a complimentary download.

Suzanne Lowe
Author, Marketplace Masters: How Professional Service Firms Compete to Win
President, Expertise Marketing, LLC

Insights on Blogging for Professional Services Marketers

This article is adapted with permission from Chapter 1 of The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil (Penguin Portfolio August 2006)

By Debbie Weil

Put on your marketing hats, folks; it’s time to think new. Here are answers to several questions that professional services marketers have about jumping into the blogosphere.

What’s a Corporate Blog?

A blog is a marketing communications channel. Picture what you might use it for. Your goals can be long-term and loose, such as improved internal communications or a closer connection with your customers. Or short-term and specific: an event, a campaign, a deadline-driven software project. Corporate blogs can be sanctioned, even encouraged, by the boss and written by individual employees at their own discretion. Or managed, formally, by the corporate communications department. They can be written by non-employees known as customer evangelists – those customers who love your company, products and services so much they spread the word for you. Sometimes the CEO or other senior executives develop a flair for blogging.

Business blogging has become a broader, muddier term. It encompasses corporate blogging. It also includes the new generation of media companies that publish networks of blogs supported by advertising. And a small number of independent bloggers who earn a living directly from their blogs, as self-publishers, by running ads. In fact a whole new segment of online advertising has grown up around blogs. Business blogging is shorthand for “So what’s the business model? How do we make money with this thing?”

Corporate blogging, in contrast, is not usually about making a quick buck. Corporate blogging is a communications and marketing channel, but with a twist – it’s two ways. You can’t foresee precisely what results you’ll get by using it. Although the positive usually outweighs the negative. And, again ideally, this channel connects you to a noisy, ragged, global conversation – the blogosphere.

As a marketing strategy, blogs are often more effective than traditional Web sites. Blogging is a powerful, low-cost way to get found by the search engines – one of the biggest reasons marketers are paying increasing attention. Prevailing wisdom goes something like this: get found in Internet search results and your voice will count. Be absent online and your company, product or service (unless you’re a Fortune 500 brand with a mega marketing budget) practically doesn’t exist.

How would a blog fit into my firm’s marketing strategy?

A blog doesn’t replace other forms of on or offline marketing. But they’re fast becoming an adjunct you shouldn’t ignore. Blogs are a quick, easy way to communicate and make a connection with your customers and the media. You can still send out press releases, publish an e-newsletter and maintain a corporate Web site. Think of blogs as a low-cost, high-impact add-on to whatever you’re doing now to communicate with your key constituencies.

Blogs are a new way to close the gap between you and your customers. Or to organize the smart thinking and reams of archived information inside your organization. Blogs are a remarkably effective way to get high search engine rankings. When someone Googles the name of your company or product – or enters keyword phrases that describe what you do – your blog is more apt to come up at the top of the page than your home page. That’s because a blog is constantly being refreshed with new content.

Finally, blogs and blogging are symptomatic of the next generation of the Web. Web 2.0 as it’s being called is the new participatory Web. It’s defined by the abundance of user-generated content – those millions of blog posts, photos, audio and video files, as well as uploaded documents created by users. The new Web is also about real-time collaboration.

How do I convince my peers in senior management that our company should be blogging?

How about this: start by emphasizing the risks of NOT blogging. That will get their attention.

• If you don’t blog, you’re not part of the conversation in the blogosphere. In other words, bloggers may be saying bad things about your company and if you’re not listening to the conversation you have no way to respond quickly and appropriately.
• You’re missing out on a fast, efficent communications channel with your customers, the media, investors and other important constituencies.
• If you don’t have a blog, your company Web site will soon look, er, so 1990s.

Then make a sensible business case using examples of what other organizations (perhaps your competition) are doing. In broad brush strokes, blogs offer an organization a way to:

• Communicate with customers in real-time
• Get positive and negative feedback from key constituencies
• Achieve high search engine rankings without spending a fortune on search engine optimization

Internal blogs enable your company to capitalize on the enormous amount of knowledge possessed by your employees. They enable real-time and systematic collaboration on software development, product development, sales and other activities. And your kicker: by not blogging you may be hurting your brand. Without a blog as part of your Web site, your company may appear walled-off and disinterested in being open to comment and criticism. See chapter 9 for a cheatsheet to make the case to your boss (or employees) for blogging.

Should we take the plunge?

Fair question. Because, in truth, creating and maintaining a blog takes work. It requires real thinking, good writing, the right touch and persistence. In addition, the ROI isn’t precisely quantifiable. And there are legitimate legal issues that need to be thought about ahead of time and conveyed to executive and employee bloggers. Here’s a three-part answer:

1. Blog or be blogged. Either you join the conversation in the blogosphere or you’re deaf to it. If you choose the latter, you’ve lost control. You can’t respond to what’s being said about you; you can’t proactively initiate conversations. You’ll look like you’re clueless and/or stonewalling. If you choose the former, you can shape what’s being said about your company even if you can’t entirely control it.
   
   
2. Think of blogging as a three-legged stool. The legs are the search engines, your customers and the media. If you’ve got a blog, you’ll rank high in search engine results. If you’ve got a blog, you’re taking advantage of a remarkably low-cost way to communicate with – and get feedback from – your customers. Finally, if your company is blogging you will likely attract media interest. It’s still early days in blogdom. Be the first in your niche and you’ll be noticed. If you’re a Fortune 1000 company with a recognizable name, you’ll get calls from reporters without having to use your PR agency.
   
   
3. Blogs are part of next-generation Web sites. They are the real-time, interactive part of a site. They may not be known as blogs in the future. They may evolve into something blog-like that enables reader participation with your site and with your company. But if you don’t embrace blogs now – or at least start thinking about incorporating a blog into your site – then you’re stuck in the old, static Web. Can you afford that? Online search is driving business results these days, whether you’re a local business or a mega corporation. You want to be found. You want your online presence to be memorable. Don’t get left behind.

Debbie Weil is the author of The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right, published in August 2006 by Penguin Portfolio. Visit www.TheCorporateBloggingBook.com to download the complete first chapter with more insights on why blogging has attracted so much attention, what makes a good corporate blog, the legal risks, and the steps you need to take. Visit her site at www.debbieweil.com.

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