HOW BLOGS CAN HELP YOUR BUSINESS

Let’s get back to business basics not because I think you don’t know your own business, but because I honestly believe that blogging can help each core fragment of what makes up a successful and viable company. The core needs for any business are as follows:

• Decent ideas

• A great product

• Visibility

• A well-trained team of people who work hard to make the company succeed You also need good marketing, great customer relations, an awesome sales force, decent customer support, and a host of other factors.

But if you have ideas, a product worth selling, a solid team behind it, and potential customers, the rest will follow naturally.

CREATING GREAT IDEAS

Every company has great ideas waiting to come to the surface. The problem with bringing those ideas to the surface is threefold: giving ideas space to develop, helping ideas get improved, and implementing the best ideas. Often it takes only one person to come up with a great idea, but it may take 100 or more people to support and implement that idea. If the idea loses support, the company will need another great idea to keep going. Great ideas can increase a business’s costs and people power, but they can also increase a business’s revenue and marketing power. This is why large companies who live or die by their great ideas employ researchers who spend their time seeking epiphanies.

The challenge for companies who invest in ideas is often that the best ideas don’t get to the top, don’t get reviewed, or don’t even get considered. This idea barrier could be killing your company. A truly open and internally viewable idea blog, or even individual employee blogs that allow people to float new ideas for peer review, should allow the best ideas to rise to the surface for selection and review. We’ll look at the concept of idea blogs more in Article 6, as they are an exciting way to empower your employees and generate thought.

CREATING GREAT PRODUCTS

The next challenge is deciding which great ideas get turned into products. After all, what good is thinking up the greatest idea in the world if your business can’t actually sell it? Smart companies hire people who are able to turn a great idea into a great product. These people, often called product specialists or product managers, know customers, know the market, and know how to deliver new products on time and on budget. However, to do their jobs well, product specialists need to talk directly to customers.

This is where focus groups, customer demo days, and other customer-listening techniques come into play. Some companies even employ staff evangelists to work one-on-one with individual customers to maintain a good relationship. We all know cases in which even the most well-intentioned products underperformed. Relying on a small sample of customers to reflect what the entire world desires is risky at best, and foolhardy at worst. If you can’t ask everyone in the world what they want, you’re unlikely to be able to deliver what everyone truly desires. With blogging, you can ask if not the entire world, then at least your entire blog readership, who are probably connected to and/or reading other blogs from all over the planet. Once you have insight into what a large community of readers wants, you can begin delivering it.

INCREASING VISIBILITY

Marketing is all about visibility making the right people aware of the right product at the right time. Allen Weiss, founder of MarketingProfs.com, says that marketing is about customers, and he’s right. The hard reality, though, is that often marketing isn’t about individual customers. Often, it’s about creating a global message to which individual customers will respond. New methods of effective marketing include creating “viral” campaigns, customer-centric events, and otherwise helping customers spread the word through incentive programs and contests.

Visibility is also sought through media reports, event sponsorship, and interactive websites. However, these visibility campaigns lack effectiveness on the one-to-one level. Companies assume that millions of people will be contacted, but only a small percentage of these people will respond. This method of marketing has its upside, but it doesn’t do anything to create relationships with customers, create positive experiences, or create customer evangelists.

HAVE YOU CAUGHT THE BUG?

In recent years, viral marketing has become the rage. The viral marketing strategy encourages customers to pass along information to others, often via e-mail. It’s effective because it can be crafted once and left up to individual consumers to spread the message themselves. Halo 2, a popular video game for Microsoft’s XBox console, engaged in one of the most successful viral marketing campaigns ever with the creation of the “I Love Bees” pseudo-game. At the release of one of the final trailers for the game, shown in theaters around the world, the final XBox logo briefly faded to www.ilovebees.com, the website address for a heretofore unknown honey manufacturer in California’s Napa Valley. Visitors were greeted with a series of disturbing and cryptic messages, including a countdown to some unknown event (though astute visitors eventually guessed that it was the game’s launch).

The campaign built up an incredible buzz that was broadcast to the world via millions of curious visitors obsessed with solving the puzzle. Entire websites and communities sprang up around trying to find a solution. Why? Because everyone loves a mystery. Campaigns such as “I Love Bees” rely on users to spread the word something that blogs also rely on. Trusting your message

to your users is one of the ways to allow them to “own your brand.”

HAVING A GREAT TEAM

One of the best ways to build a great business is to create a great team. Great teams will think up great ideas, build visibility, and spot defects in products, which they will then correct. A great team can fix just about any problem, given the right resources, and is happy to take on just about any challenge. Unfortunately, great teams can be difficult to create and keep motivated. Anyone who’s built successful teams knows that more often than not some particular “X Factor” will make or break the team: often the ability to find common ground and common interests can be a make-or-break issue.

A team comprising colleagues with common interests, backgrounds, or passions will be able to rely on those commonalities, even in the most adverse circumstances. The challenge is to find employees who fit together; few employee profiles include information that will help you find the common ground. To solve this dilemma, many large corporations are turning to self-forming and self-sustaining teams. These people have found that they have things in common and they work well together. Companies post internal team opportunities that “ultra teams” can choose to tackle or ignore. Sometimes projects will be assigned based on need, but, generally, having a team own a topic is a more effective tactic. The challenge for companies looking to enable these dynamic teams is in figuring out how to enable employees to connect based on passion. Passion is an important part of any successful team without passion, a team will not only find itself quickly in a rut, but it will likely find its members unable to gel, have fun, or help the company in a meaningful way.

You’ll learn how to create dynamic internal teams.