The last part of this series on blogging for business success…

A Genuine Conversation:  Blogs are also engaging for readers because they provide a convenient forum for genuine dialogue.  Successful blogs build on direct communication.  Once your fresh content has attracted readers, you want to keep them engaged in the conversation you’ve started.  Blogs provide a number of ways to encourage that connection.

1.  Reader comments– Most non-blog web sites don’t offer a way for people to comment on specific new content added to the site.  Tenacious readers may hunt down your email address and send you their thoughts, but that kind of conversation takes place in private, adding nothing to the vitality of your site.  Blog comments add the voices of your readers to your posts and give you an opportunity to gain priceless insight about your market and its view of your products/services and your company.

2.  Interaction with other bloggers– Blogging culture encourages conversations that start on one blog and spill over into others.  Blog A discusses (and links to) a post on Blog B, and the readers of both blogs leave comments that link to other sites, spreading the conversation to even more readers and creating the “buzz” that blogging is famous for.

3. Sponsor or host blogs– A low-risk strategy is to sponsor a blog that contains editorial content that appeals to your potential and existing customers.  This is what Boeing has done with their “inFlightHQ” blog.  inFlightHQ is not a blog specifically about Boeing or its products, but it does contain posts that business flyers find interesting with its “tools, tips, and techniques for being productive at 30,000 feet.”  This approach doesn’t require the company to blog, and presents little risk.

In conclusion, one of the most beautiful things about blogs is that they don’t require a massive Web design project.  They’re small, nimble, and simply structured, so your company can launch its blog in a matter of hours and immediately begin playing with the medium.

Part 2 of the blog series… Today, unobtrusive repetition of the marketer’s messaging.

Broadcast your content automatically:  Blogs can broadcast their content via “RSS feeds.”  RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication, and simple is the key word.  This technology, which is built into most blogging systems and applications, allows people to subscribe to your blog they way they’d subscribe to an email newsletter… without you doing any extra work or managing a list of subscribers. 

Again, let’s look at the paragraph above:  Prospects and customers are opting-in and want to receive ongoing contact and communications with your company!  The importance of the “stickiness” marketers can now create between prospects and customers to their brands through RSS feeds cannot be overemphasized.  One of the most interesting things people discover when they start a company blog with syndication is how soon they get visitors and subscribers.  These same potential customers receive notification via their Web browser, email system, or special news-reading software when your blog is updated.  Your messages don’t get lost in email or mistaken for spam, your clients can read it when they want to, and it all drives traffic back to your site. 

By analyzing public reaction to a blog, reading comments, and directly engaging in the world of bloggers (informally known as the “blogosphere”), companies can gain access to a wealth of information about their market’s opinion of them.  By responding to comments, sponsoring or hosting blogs on other sites, and running your own company’s blog, businesses can build, revive, and extend their brands for several reasons that I’ll explore over the next several days.

Readers LIKE Blogs:  In the age of information overload, headlines and new blurbs that are short, focused, and written in conversational English are much appreciated by online readers (am I feeling your appreciation right now?  just kidding!).    Additionally, it’s now common for people to find answers to questions via search engines.  Due to simple structure, strong link networks, and fresh content, blogs have enormous appeal to search engines, and it’s often easier to find relevant blogged content than to find the same information on traditional Web pages.  Many bloggers have found that their posts often rank higher in Google than the pages and sites they are writing about!

Fragmenting media and changing behavior by consumers (as well as the media’s claim of a softening economy) are exposing the traditional model’s limits and are forcing marketers more and more to closely watch their ROI.  Consider the following trends:

- Media proliferation:  In the United States, the original handful of TV stations has proliferated into more than 1,600 broadcast and cable TV outlets.  Similar trends are under way in Europe.

- Multitasking:  While surfing the Web, the typical U.S. teenager engages in an average of two other activities, one of which is often homework.  Some 80% of businesspeople also multitask.

- “Switching off”:  Consumers are increasingly selective about what they watch and the advertising messages they trust.  According to Yankelovich Partners, 65% of them feel “constantly bombarded with too much advertising,” 69% are “interested in products and services that would help skip or block marketing,” and 54% “avoid buying products that overwhelm with advertising and marketing.”

It’s time for marketers to be consistent in applying investment fundamentals such as clarifying the objectives of marketing investments, finding and exploiting points of economic leverage, managing risk, and tracking returns that have long been well established.

To address the increasing issue of how to optimize a number of marketing investments, each with different time horizons and measures of success, across multiple media channels, it’s also vital to distinguish between “maintenance” marketing and “growth” objectives.  Maintenance is the minimum spending required for a competitive position in the marketplace.  Growth investments increase your brand’s market share, drive incremental increases in consumption, and attract new users to the products/services.

Marketers aiming for strong returns should shart seeing themselves as investment managers for their marketing budgets.  These activities may be more difficult and time consuming than relying solely on old rules of thumb or new analytic approaches, but it is the only answer in today’s marketing environment.