AWARENESS PUBLISHING

Blogs empower people to be able to write their own thoughts quickly and easily online as a “personal publishing” forum. Blogs are equally powerful for companies, though, as we’ve explored throughout this article. Business blogging isn’t really about personal publishing at all it’s a different kind of publishing power: I call it “awareness publishing.” Using the blog, companies small and large are in charge of generating awareness and visibility and attracting attention. Before blogs, communication occurred through the media, public relations, and marketing. With blogs, businesses and business leaders can talk directly to customers and build relationships in entirely new ways, with great results.

Awareness publishing, and business blogging, are important because they put companies in control. Company blogs create a new degree of interactivity with customers that had rarely been experienced before blogging, especially since most interaction occurs on a small scale with a few dozen or a few hundred of your customers. Now, though, you can interact with anyone your customers as well as hundreds or thousands of potential new customers all at the same time, and you can allow them to respond to you directly. In addition, your audience can be in control. One reason blogs work so well is because people get to respond in the comments area of the blog. Comments create a great two-way conversation, allowing your blog to interact with clients instead of just being a way to push your ideas onto your clients. As a result, customers are empowered to choose to read and participate in your blog and are therefore empowered to begin a relationship with you, which would have been much more difficult in other circumstances. In other media, communication is about your business selling something to the customer, while blogs are really about communication, with no strings attached.

Awareness publishing also helps spread the message. As good as your message may be, and as good as communication on your blog will surely become, your business needs to reach beyond the four walls that surround your physical offices into the larger world. Blogs spread the message in a variety of ways, with tracking tools such as Technorati to bloggers’ tendency to generously link to interesting tidbits, and this gives your message a greater ability to spread naturally and quickly throughout your community.

NEW AWARENESS

The concepts of awareness publishing aren’t just about raising your company’s visibility; they’re also about raising awareness in areas for which your customers and readers may not otherwise be able to access. Blogs provide a way for you to shed light on what your company is really doing, and what your company is really about. It doesn’t need to come in the form of announcements or press releases; instead, it should be in the conversational tone of the blog. If a customer asks about your civic-mindedness, for example, you can let him or her know that you honestly care about the community so much so that you’ve decided to sponsor a local park, and that you’re donating employee time to help with a local wetlands issue.

Blogs shouldn’t be used as a pulpit for this type of thing, but they do offer a way to engage your audience in areas of which they may not otherwise be aware. Use this capacity wisely: You don’t need to brag about your company’s philanthropic events or other deeds. Remember that real conversations are based on respect, and that your feedback is most wanted and most valuable when it’s asked for. So while your wetlands project may be great for the community, boasting about your community-mindedness is not necessarily the best way to respond to someone who posts a message like “You stink!”

BENEFITS OF AWARENESS PUBLISHING

When I envisioned this article, the concepts of awareness publishing were incredibly important to me. Problem was, they were largely concepts until my editor began pushing me for the real benefits. As we brainstormed on these benefits, it became clear that blogging was about more than just raising your business’s awareness and visibility.

Gaining Awareness

As discussed several times in this article, the measure of your brand and your business’s advertising effectiveness is really about how much mindshare you have with your customers. Conversations are great ways to increase mindshare, and your blog provides a great mechanism for at least kick-starting those conversations. Getting Feedback The more people are aware of you and your company, the more they talk about you and your company. By providing a place for people to talk to you, and each other, about their joys and frustrations, you not only create a community of people who get to hear directly from you, but you get to participate in some great feedback sessions.

Presenting Your Side of the Story

Several high-profile executives, such as Dallas Mavericks owner Marc Cuban and Sun Microsystems’ Jonathan Schwartz, have turned to blogging as a way to express the real “whys” behind a story. Too often with the mainstream press, the truth of the story can get lost in the reporter’s “angle.” Blogs provide a fantastic way for you not only to say exactly what you mean to say, in context, but also to provide answers to why your business is doing what it’s doing in an open and honest way.

Creating Opportunities for Dialogue

Much of blogging is about dialogue. A lot of talk happens in the blogosphere, but one of the great benefits of blogging is that it can kick off person-to-person conversations. Text is great for getting introduced, but nothing beats a phone call, a lunch date, or a round of golf or tennis for really getting to know someone. Blogs are great for introducing yourself, establishing relationships, and kick-starting conversations that create new opportunities.

WHERE BLOGGING IS HEADED

So where is blogging going? We looked at some of the trends that will begin converging (or diverging) earlier in this article, but our final area of discussion in this article will be about where blogging is going and what’s going to take it there. I’ve done hundreds of interviews in magazines, newspapers, and radio shows about blogging. I’m frequently asked this question: “Where is blogging headed in the next five or ten years?” Blogging is just so new that it’s hard to say exactly where it will be by, say, 2010. Typically, when asked, I’ve offered one of three responses:

• Blogs will disappear. Blogs will become so ubiquitous that they’ll be forgotten as a buzzword. Everyone will have a blog, it will be a natural extension of every website, and it will be natural for people to post comments on all kinds of content, including news articles and movie trailers.

• Blogs will change everything. This one is sometimes used just to precipitate discussion, but I’ll sometimes say “Blogs will completely redefine everything businesses do” to start a real conversation on the merits of blogging. The fact is, blogs could easily change many of the facets of how people react to, and expect to interact with, businesses from corner stores to major corporations. Blogs are the embodiment of the consumer’s ability to discern, and the business’s ability to listen: together, these two forces could easily change how all businesses interact and converse with customers.

• Blogs are a communications medium and will never die. Early in the process of writing this article, I had a mild epiphany: blogs are a communications medium. I realized that no communications medium that reached the mainstream has died not the fax, not the telegraph, not the letter, not the phone. OK, so some have died we rarely use carrier pigeons or smoke signals anymore but the point remains: once something is mainstream, it takes years, even decades, for it to change, even if something better comes along. Blogs will change. Lots of companies will have blogs. Blogs are revolutionary. But no matter what happens, blogs will be a communications medium for many years to come.

BLOGS REPLACE WEBSITES

One of the main schools of thought relative to where blogs are going is that they may eventually completely replace most typical corporate websites. Instead of having an “About Us” page that stays the same, companies will have an “About Us” category on their blogs that gets updated at least once a month with new company-related information. Instead of having an “About the CEO” page, the CEO will have his or her own blog. At their core, blogs are simply websites that empower communication. Why wouldn’t a company want to empower communication across its entire website?

communicating with your customers using your blog, and even if blogs go out of style and you keep using them and communicating with them, they can still bring value to your company; there may never be a reason to stop using blogs.

WRAPPING IT UP

Each of the trends in this article is important; however, exactly how these collisions will play out and what the changes in blogging will mean to your business are uncertain. Does it even matter if a blogger makes money off his or her blog, as long as the blogger stays authentic? Can a blogger not find a way to be both fast and accurate? Can traffic matter to a business, as long as relationships still matter?

All of these questions will be answered with time. Your business needs to keep its finger on the pulse of blogging; you need to know why you are blogging, why you’re succeeding, and how best to use this exciting medium, publishing platform, and communications tool to your advantage. Some of that will be internal to your company and some of it will be external to the world. Either way, though, you need to find out how you can use blogging to help you and your business. This glimpse into the future of blogging brings this article to a close. I’ve included an appendix with a sample blogging policy, as well as a glossary of blogging terms, should you need them. Hopefully this article has provided you with insight into how blogging can best be used.