Dude, Blog Your Business!

In May 2005 Stephen Baker and Heather Green for Business Week  wrote a story called ‘Blogs Will Change Your Business’. This story was still being visited online so often that they thought it would be a good idea to update it, since many of the ideas talked about were now out of date.

The updated one, now called  ’Social Media Will Change Your Business’, written for a 2008 audience – subtitled, by the way, with ’Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later’ -started off in exactly the same way.

If you ever thought that blogs were not that relevant to your business then read on: “Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business—including yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite. (And yes, that goes for us, too.)”

So, don’t just take our word for it – hear it from one of the most respected sources on business matters, Business Week. If you want to read the whole article you can see it at the following link:
www.businessweek.com/go/08/blog.

Yes, sad to say – both Dave and I were born of biz op – or “business opportunity” to give it its full title. We met while working for a company that was big on selling the “opportunity” and short on delivering the “business” – standard biz op fare really. But we were both passionate about the potential in blogging as a marketing tool for business, and both had strong ideas on what a proper blog should look like.

Blogging is a conversation. It is a conversation that uses a myriad of media to express an idea – things like text, or audio, or video, or images.
“A picture paints a thousand words” someone famously said. Think, therefore, how many words can be painted if you also converse with audio and video, as well as pictures and words – all in one medium. That is what a blog can do.

The thing about conversations is that they are a two-way process. That is what makes blogging such a leap forward from static web sites – they allow, even encourage, a two-way conversation. Don’t just show your customers what you have got to offer – talk to them about what you have to offer – tell them how great it is and why what you have to offer is so much better than what anyone else has to offer.

Ultimately, the most successful businesses are those that do business with integrity. In the same way a blog will only work if you blog with integrity. That is probably the biggest lesson we learned in working for that other firm – you can’t fake it, it just won’t work. And that is why we will always operate with full integrity on everything we do. One thing you will never get from us is a ‘biz op’.

If you want to know how a blog can work for your business just read our articles at the top of the page, and then give us a call and we’ll see how we can help you make it happen!