Bill Gates Thinks Microsoft is in Danger from Blogging

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July 13, 2004

Bill Gates Thinks Microsoft is in Danger from Blogging

Remember 1995. Bill Gates did not think the web was important. He nearly made a big blunder by not recognizing the web’s importance, but Microsoft eventually won the day against Netscape.

Today, Bill Gates and other senior executives will not let another technology leapfrog them again. Maybe fearing what will happen to Microsoft if they don’t let their employees’ blog, Microsoft has over 700 employees blogging today.

Led by such Microsoft blogging pioneers as Robert Scoble, Microsoft has given its marketing and technical teams simple blogging tools to start posting content about their jobs and hobbies.

To some, Microsoft is the poster child for large faceless corporation, all this blogging at Microsoft lets MS technical people and marketers put a human face on Microsoft and communicate the company message quickly.

Intelliseek, a company researching and tracking consumer generated media, thinks any company should be monitoring what its customers are satying on forums, blogs and social networking sites.

From MarketingSherpa.com’s article ‘How to track (and influence) consumer buzz online about your brand’ “2004 Forrester/Intelliseek research shows that more than 60% of consumers trust other consumers' online postings about products and brands. In comparison, pop-ads are only trusted by roughly 5%, search ads by less than 40%, branded ads by less than 50%. So an individual consumer post may have far greater impact than the online ad campaign you paid for.”

Tech companies like MicroSoft and Macromedia have a clue. They are on the blogging train now before it leaves the station.

If the only time you ever hear from a PR or marketing professional is when they want to sell you something. Then in today’s media savvy society your average customer will discount or ignore their voice.

If you’re company’s marketing or technical employees are corporate bloggers. Mixing product announcements with an ongoing dialogue about their children’s latest soccer tournament. The audiences’ perception about your company subtly changes.

Therefore with blogging, your audience will listen, and your company has a better change to communicate their message.

CORPORATE BLOGGING PROPOSAL

There are two types of corporate blogs. Those blogs that link into a company's existing customer community and those blogs that seek to create one.

A company with an established brand and customer base that uses the Internet can use a corporate blog to start an online conversation with customers.

Forums provide opportunities for customers to talk and discuss products. But with a forum a company cannot totally control the direction of the online conversation.

A blog lets a company direct and display the content of a website in much more newsy format.

Corporate blogs are similar to online newspapers, in that they allow companies to tell their audience the latest news on both their industry and company’s products.

THE BENEFITS OF CORPORATE BLOGGING

Corporate blogging has been around for two to three years as an Internet marketing method.

A corporate blog is a website dedicated to a particular company, product or industry. One or more authors can run a blog. Authors can be technical or marketing orientated.

The layout of a blog allows a blogger to make daily or hourly posts to a website. This means that, culturally a blog allows a blogger to post many entries on the theme of the blog, thereby changing the content of the home page on a constant basis.

A corporate blog focused on the industry or a company’s products provides several advantages, including:

1) The search engine optimization benefits from a blog. The SEO benefits come from the quantity of content on a blog. It’s also culturally acceptable to post lots of pages of content on a regular (daily) basis. Search engines like new content, especially content that comprises of short paragraphs with many rich and relevant keywords. It’s also easy to generate and boost link popularity to your corporate blog. Here’s why, it is culturally acceptable to post links to other blogs. If you’re posting is relevant and useful to the other blog. The potential customer good will and PR benefits will only be really forthcoming after a few months of blogging. It will take some time to get high rankings in search engines. The quicker you start the higher your ranking.

2) Corporate blogs are learning tools for companies. Blogs to be successful have to be updated constantly. You also have the opportunity to interact with an audience informally. Much more than a corporate website. Corporate bloggers can therefore easily develop online conversations with an audience about products and a company’s industry. Microsoft and Macromedia are two companies using corporate blogging extensively. Both companies technical and development teams are writing blogs to communicate the latest information about products with customers. Blogs allow comment postings from customers. As a result such technical companies are capturing new information from customers at a faster rate.

3) Small hard dollar cost, higher soft dollar costs. Return on investment is why a company should start a corporate blog now. The hard dollar investment is small. Blog are complex content management run websites. However, a simple blogging tool can be rented for $50/year. The soft dollar investment requires regular postings at least 3 times a week.

4) E-mail is losing its effectiveness as a communications tool. RSS will replace e-mail in key areas. RSS (really simple syndication), a method for syndicating content from a source (a website or a blog). RSS is providing an alternative to email as a way to keep in contact with websites and email newsletters. Tired with the barrage of permission-based e-mails, customers will switch to readers that read RSS content. A customer reads their RSS content through a reader on a daily basis. While, at the moment, it is presently culturally unacceptable to send too many emails, even permission based email. Armed with an RSS reader your audience will demand more content. Those corporate bloggers who provide regular content will be more likely to keep their audience’s attention in an RSS reader.

5) Blogs are communications tools that give your company a touch of honesty and establish the company has humans running the place. With a blog it is culturally acceptable for employees to use humor and inject their personality into their online conversations with an audience. Microsoft’s progress into corporate blogging (over 700 bloggers) illustrates that corporate blogging on a larger scale may subtly change an audience's perception about a company.

Global PR Blog Week 1.0

July 13, 2004

Bill Gates Thinks Microsoft is in Danger from Blogging

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