Marketing Begins At Home - Latest Comments in wither the blog

Re: wither the blog

johntunger — Sat, 16 Apr 2005 02:17:54 -0000

1. I'm engaging in an example of "What makes blogs so special" right this minute by commenting in reply to your question: instant feedback from your target audience is a big plus for blogs. But wait! There's more!

2. As people find older entries via search, comments continue over time, giving you an idea as to whether your message (or perception of your message) is changing with time.

(Unless comment spam forces you to close the comments after a time, and presuming that you do read them)

3. Regular readers often engage each other in the comment space, which will often teach you things about your target audience that you might not learn when engaging them directly.

3b. They may also collaborate to solve problems for you, or around your product/idea/focus (hereafter thingie).

4. The social aspect of readers engaging each other can provide a feeling of community centered around your thingie. A feeling of belonging has never hurt a product, to my knowledge.

5. The comments are also a space where you can personally greet, thank or engage each reader who is invested enough to provide feedback in the first place (hint hint). You see this often at gapingvoid, for instance. Providing that feeling of immediacy and accessibility is really key to humanizing your thingie.

6. Having a quasi-permanent, open, social, public record of your thoughts and actions and interactions with others provides people a lot more reason to trust you than a simple mission statement and a paragraph or two on the "history" of your thingie. I say quasi-permanent because obviously you can remove comments or entries, even edit them, but the bulk of your content will either read as authentic or not. The fact remains that a long, open track record is likely to generate trust quicker than boilerplate.

Re: wither the blog

Peter Flaschner — Fri, 15 Apr 2005 08:56:38 -0000

How about "Increased Sales: by staying in contact with you customer base, you a) can let them know when new products/services come available, b) maintain top of mind awareness, c) build a relationship that will weather the inevitable slip ups.

Re: wither the blog

Kathy Sierra — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 15:25:26 -0000

Great list... I'd like to add "addictive". Because they keep changing (ideally every day), readers want their daily "fix". The frequency (and ease) of updates is unique, powerful, and compelling.

Re: wither the blog

Darren — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 12:42:51 -0000

Blogs can be 'viral'. Say I link to your article about blogs and link to it, first it rank goes up in google, but it means the article has to links on the web. Now someone links to my article about blogs, it spreads. You can't create an ad page on web and get people to link to it for free, but they will do exactly that with a blog.

Re: wither the blog

Marc Snyder — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 09:17:10 -0000

Media: More and more journalists are subscribing to RSS feeds.

Cutting edge-ness: The blog-savvy clients are still few and far between. Demonstrating that this particular client (through your good services) gets it, is worth its weight in gold. That is, if you/he doesn't f*** it up :)

MS