Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

Gillin told me that the spark for the book came during a meeting of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, where VisiCalc spreadsheet program co-creator Dan Bricklin was speaking. “At the end of his presentation he asked if anyone was going to blog about it,” Gillin recalls. “I had a very lightly maintained blog, so I did 700 words on the session, and e-mailed Dan, who then posted about it on his blog. Over the next two days my blog received 800 visitors – and I had been getting 10-15 visitors a day.”

Gillin says he and his former colleagues at TechTarget, which publishes integrated media aimed at helping IT professionals, “would send out a dedicated e-mail to up to 50,000 people, and we would have been happy if we’d gotten 800 visitors.”

“The New Influencers” explores podcasting and online social networking, as well as its main focus, the blogosphere. “Traditional marketing will have to change pretty radically to accommodate all this,” Gillin declares. “It will be a change for the better, but it will be disruptive. It’s no longer about delivering a message repeatedly and expecting people to respond. Now the customers are telling you what your message is – or at least what it should be.”

One potential benefit for customers in this Blog New World? “Companies can’t lie to people anymore. Social media has made it so easy for people to publish that anything you want to cover up will be uncovered and published by someone else. You have to offer up complete transparency and honesty about your policies and products.”

Some companies maintain a blog just to prove they’re “with it,” but Gillin warns that such an approach is counterproductive.

“A lot of companies haven’t really committed to [blogging],” he says. “They dip their toe in the water, get someone at the company to blog about [the company] but they don’t really run with it – it just sits there, lies fallow and dies. Or they have one person out there who’s fairly active and does everything right, but the company doesn’t pick up on it and expand it. Doing it right means keeping at it, and devoting the time and resources necessary to do it well.

“I’ve worked with a lot of clients who want to blog but they’re not sure what they want to say,” he continues. “So they either go out with ‘press release-ware,’ writing Marketing-Speak that’s not very compelling, or they go out and try and be as provocative as possible, stir things up, attack their competitors. But the ethos in the blogophere has become very polite and deferential, and unprovoked, unmitigated attacks don’t go over very well.”

The best approach to company blogging, he says, is to reflect the firm’s personality and/or provide valuable information about the organization, its products and/or services. “GM and Southwest Airlines have both done excellent jobs with this,” he reports. “If you do blog, you really have three constituencies: search engines, which have the potential to be of great importance if you do it correctly; customers; and media. Many companies don’t think about media as much as they should, but media is increasingly reading company blogs, with an eye on picking up stories or other information.”

To blog, then, or not to blog? Only if it really makes sense for your company, Gillin says. Just because your competitor’s CEO is regurgitating his own press releases doesn’t mean you should too. After all, a little technology-based company called Apple doesn’t have a blog – and they seem to be doing all right.