Ideas To Help your Business by Using Blogs

written by: Dino Joszi; article published: year 2006, month 09;


In: Categories » Internet » Blogs and forums » Ideas To Help your Business by Using Blogs

Beyond the core concepts of improving your ideas, products, visibility, and team cohesiveness, blogs can improve your business dozens of other ways. Here are a few examples to wet your whistle as we get deeper into exploring blogs.

Improve Customer Loyalty Elisa Camahort is a passionate blogger. She helps theatres in her area, such as 42nd St. Moon (http://42ndstmoon.blogspot.com) by blogging behind-thescenes details, which dedicated theatre-goers love. She also features discounts for theatres to track how effective blogging is at driving new ticket sales. Overall, the ability to connect with their niche audience has been a huge boon for the small theatres that Camahort passionately serves.

Build an Early Buzz Nooked (http://blog.nooked.com/) was first envisioned on the blog, was built on the blog, and has grown through the blog. Nooked is an RSS tracking company—RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and refers to a format used for easily distributing news on the Internet via feeds or channels. At each step of the way, the Nooked blog has been full of inside information that is devoured with abandon by those following the project’s progress. It is the perfect example of how to use blogs to build a buzz early on in a product’s development cycle.

React to Negative Events Earlier this year, General Motors engaged in some major restructuring. GM Chairman Rick Wagoner took a larger degree of control in the company by restructuring selected units so that they reported directly to him—these selected units were previously under the care of such key executives as Bob Lutz. Interestingly, Lutz is the primary author of GM’s exceedingly popular FastLane blogs. Instead of being silent about the event, Lutz was able to turn what many had considered a demotion into a positive thing: he was able to focus entirely on what he loved— product development. Several hundred bloggers and commenters supported his attitude by commenting and followed his example of how to deal with negativity in a public forum.

Extend Your Influence to Your Influencers For many companies, the key to success is knowing who influences the industry. For Microsoft, developers are first priority. To influence developers, Microsoft launched Channel 9 (http://channel9 .msdn.com), which gave a true inside look at the company through daily video profiles of important figures in each product group. The response to this blog and its video angle took everyone at Microsoft by surprise; the blog community grew to more than 50,000 members, making it one of the largest developer communities ever.

legal disclaimer

1) Our website is not responsible for the information contained by this article as well for any and all copyright infringements by authors and writers. E-articles is a free information resource. If you suspect this article for any copyright infringements, please read the Terms of service and contact us to investigate the problem.
2) The E-articles directory team is not responsible for inaccuracies, falsehoods, or any other types of misinformation this tutorial may contain and will not be liable for any loss or damage suffered by a user through the user's reliance on the information gained here. Please read the Terms of service

Useful tools and features

Translate this article to...    Send this article to you or to a friend

Link to this article from your page   
If you like this article (tutorial), please link to it from your web page using the information above. Linking to this page, this is the only way to help us improve our service, the same time providing your visitors with a way to improve their online experience.

related articles

1. Who is Blogging Today
Companies are blogging at a phenomenal rate. From large companies, such as Microsoft and Boeing, to small companies, such as Thomas Mahon’s tailoring business and Elisa Camahort’s marketing and public relations firm, businesses of all stripes are using the revolutionary power of blogs to create positive experiences, increase influence, and provide continual dialogues. Some of these businesses will be your competitors, others will be your partners, and some blogs might even be written by your employees. From GM&rsq...

2. How to create a Blog at BlogSpot
The following steps describe the simple process of naming, describing, and addressing a new Weblog, and choosing a page-design template. These steps are for hosting the Weblog at BlogSpot, Blogger’s free Weblog host. Like any site, a Weblog must be hosted on an Internet server. BlogSpot provides that server, making it easy to get started even if you’ve never made a Web page or created a Web hosting account. If you have a Web site already or want to open a new Web host account (not at BlogSpot) for housing your Weblog, Blo...

3. Short Blogging History
The history of blogging is a long and convoluted one. Blogging has been around in some form since the earliest days of the Internet. In fact, one of the first web pages was similar to a blog in that its author, Internet creator Tim Berners-Lee, regularly updated it with a list of all websites (only a few dozen at the time). Blogging eventually evolved into a means of sharing both personal expression and other information that individuals found valuable. Since its beginning, blogging has enjoyed a slight duality: on o...

4. How to start blogging and how to choose the best blog platform
When I talk to executives, business owners, marketers, or consultants, I invariably get asked one of two questions: “What is a blog?” or “How do I start my own blog?” Hopefully, by now I’ve answered the first question, but the second deserves an in-depth look. The process for contributing to any conversation goes something like this: 1. Listen to the conversation. 2. Understand what’s being said in the conversation. 3. Value the audience and the conversation itself. 4. ...

5. 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 relatio...

6. Blogging ~ Transmitting vs. Engaging
Most businesses and companies function in a “transmission” mindset. When they have a new product, they exhibit some kind of advertisement—be it a sign in the window out front or a national television ad. They try and create buzz by displaying SALE ! in advertisements and in the window, in great big letters that are impossible to miss. The reality is that people don’t want to be talked at, they want to be talked with. Companies around the world are beginning to realize that while transmission-based commu...

7. The choice of Blogging
Clearly, if you are not blogging, you are losing customers you could be gaining, you are losing customers you currently have, you are losing influence you could be wielding, and you are losing out on relationships that could redefine your company. When your customers are talking, you have a responsibility to engage with them. The great thing about blogging is that it can have business benefits regardless of whether or not you actually have your own blog: you can still listen to your customers and engage with them even ...

8. A Short History of the Web
In the late 1950s, the U.S. government formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). This was largely a response to the Russian success in launching the Sputnik satellite and employed some of the country's top scientific intellects in research work with U.S. military applications. During the 1960s, the agency created a decentralized computer network known as ARPAnet. This embryonic network initially linked four computers located at the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, the Univ...

9. The Five Steps of Effective Communication on Blogs
Your customers are talking, your employees are talking, and your partners and suppliers are talking. With blogging, the conversation is potentially limitless. The challenge for most companies who engage in customer conversation isn’t obtaining feedback; it’s how best to deal with the feedback, both positive and negative. At the end of the day, you need to realize that these conversations include current customers, potential customers, employees, and partners. If you ignore these comments, you are ignoring valuable feedback, poten...

10. What Blogs Can Do
An open and honest public blog, written by an authoritative voice from within your company, allows your business to create a different type of experience between you and your customers: it allow  you to create legitimate conversations that simply weren’t possible before online blogging. Blogging means your company will no longer need to depend on expensive focus groups, feedback forms, e-mail, and other time-consuming and tedious methods used for gaining feedback. If you want to know why your latest product isn&rsqu...