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Can Blogs get more lucidity to Business
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Posted On Sep 04, 2007
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Blogs are changing the world? Yes, you bet they are! They raising money, awareness, hope for causes all around the world. And the best part of blogging is that anyone can do it from anywhere.
What is Blogging?
Blogging is a certain way of collecting links to webpages and sharing your thoughts and ideas with other Internet users.
Blogs (or Weblogs) are basically online journals or diaries, which are great for sharing information and ideas.
Why people blog?
As we all know that surfing is no fun if you can't tell people what you've found.
Not many of us send emails to our friends with URLs of a particularly interesting webpage, annotated with your own opinion on it.
Wouldn't it be good to get your own web page where you could publish these comments, plus the links you find, turn it into a daily journal of thoughts and ideas and make the whole thing available to the world?
Well now you can, and if you do, you'll be joining the phenomenon that has become 'blogging'.
Business and Blogging
Today most of the small-business owners and managers are a bit overwhelmed by the available Internet communication tool like blogging. But often when they face some unfamiliar technology, most the users simply avoid it. Well, I would like to discuss how small business can benefit from using blogs. They can help raise awareness, increase customer loyalty, and boost sales.
A business blog is a window into your business's people, culture and values. It allows your customers to connect to your brand in a way that encourages community, trust, and, of course, repeat sales. In today's crowded marketplace, you businesses are embracing any opportunity to win consumer loyalty.
It covers the company culture, industry trends, or even items that are of interest to your business.
A business blog can also serve as a crisis communications tool, providing customers with company’s opinion or defense—instantly.
How does blogging get more transparency to a business?
As we all agree that online visibility is very important for any business in current wired society. People regularly turn to the Internet instead of to phone books, newspapers, or TV to find the vendors they need.
Business blogs has proved to be an incredible online marketing tool that has saved a sum of money and still provided great business opportunities in just one click. They have helped effectively position products in the market through the most user friendly and flexible medium.
There are a number of ways blogging is helping business grow:
A huge amount of blogs are added each day and millions of blog readers reading it. We can well imagine how much gain a company will have, if their products are advertised through blogs. With internet information making a spread so quickly, one impressive writeup with a product can grab hundreds of possible customers.
Blogs leads to more open communication with customers that further creates trust and loyalty among them. Through blogs, companies respond more to the customer’s questions and comments that makes them more willing to try products and services.
Blogs is best for product research and reviews. It is easier for the companies to improve on their products if they observe their customers’ thinking and behavioral patterns. They also take immediate action to their customers’ concerns.
And lastly, Bloggers are reasonable, friendly and helpful. They create a kind of blogosphere for a product, all that a company does is participate in the culture and the product. That surely is considered in their next stop to supermarket.
Companies today are actively promoting business blogs by submitting their blog to blog search site and directories for better marketing results. Marketing possibilities are just around the corner waiting to strike sale scales up.
There is another very important thing that goes in conjunction with the blogs to get the best benefits, known as RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Companies use effective keywords phrases to generate high ranking status in the search engine traffic. This gives business a better chance of being noticed by people leading to their blog. And more traffic leads to more potential sales.
As companies are convinced with the potentials of business blogs for marketing and targeting sales increase, they need to be in tune with the business objectives and see if blogging can really help them achieve their goal.
Lets take a look at few examples of the companies that have introduced blogging to enhance their growth
Among one of the best companies to launch blog was IBM. Today IBM maintains a public index of blogs. The company has recently launched their corporate blogs. Employees are taught to blog and are guided to appropriate blogging content.
The idea of blogging is to improve IBM's competitive position in key IT markets by having more of its tech gurus participating in online communities and discussions.
By blogging IBM is trying to cultivate relationships with the open-source developer community. This resulted in a significant competitive advantage for IBM because it reduced software development costs, and it hurt its large competitors.
Another company that entered the blogging splash is Microsoft. Blogging has been largely helping Microsoft communicate better with their customers. With a company of around 57,000 employees customers don’t know who to contact. Blogs are helping Microsoft to listen and become more customer focused.
The move to more transparency within Microsoft is a big change in mindset. Under the direction of blogs and bloggers there is a new drive to have more transparency in the company. Microsoft has realized that to remain competitive the company has to rely on the expertise and skills of its employees, by empowering each Microsoft employee, each employee effectively becomes a real functioning brand manager for Microsoft whose role is to help the customer no matter what role they play in the company. With blogs, communicating that response quickly and effectively has become a lot easier in the last few years.
Today individual Microsoft product teams are stating their goal is to reach out to customers and humanize their products and technologies. Blogs are helping them to achieve those goals.
Amazon is an unquestioned winner of the first great wave of online business. It has placed itself high by showing superior technology and merchandising. Being on the top, there is more danger of becoming complacent. To sustain this position and its customers Amazon introduced blogging. They realize that they can’t ignore innovation--particularly innovation that puts them closer to their customers. They need to know everything about its customers and blogging made it easy.
 The most prominent results they have traced after blogging is sales figures. They found a direct correlation between favorable blogs and immediate sales.
I believe blogging is absolutely applicable to Amazon as what the small book stores have is “Book Buddies”, employee and owners who read books, who share their enthusiasm for books, who ask customers how they liked their books. In short they have passion and authority for books that Amazon does not yet display. A blog cures that.
Where do we see blogging in the coming years?
I have been writing all about blogging and why blogging is important? And I totally agree that blogging is very significant to any kind of business or user.
Blog is undoubtedly the next big thing. It is the most representative of the two-way media technologies that are going to disrupt nearly every industry.
A lot more is coming, one can use blog to peak interest in future products and projects. It’s a great way to keep notes about what a company plans for its customers. Plus, blog tool has a comments feature, companies can use that to judge interest before it goes live.
Rather than writing, companies could put up a daily photo for their customers. A photo and a short description can be very compelling.
Businesses aware of the software company can often be fascinating for the customers, to see what the software developers are doing and how new projects might be moving forward.
The most common use for business blogs will be news, usually about the specific topic relevant to the company.
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