Blogging For More Sales, To Influence the Media and Show Your Expertise
So it's almost the end of the 4th quarter, and you're really not quite sure whether or not your company's going to come out a winner when it comes to earnings, or perhaps you're a single salesperson in a company that makes you at least meet your monthly quota, but for some reason people just aren't buying.
Why aren't they buying? Well, perhaps you have a useless product or service, or perhaps you just haven't educated them enough about it, other than your sales pitch, which people are rather sick of hearing. Pitching doesn't sell things, anyway. Not anymore. Nope. People are consciously tuning your ads out, too. What's going on?
Throughout the 20th century information became abundant. People only became dependent upon salespeople to make the actual purchase, or transaction, as we call it in my business. This, of course, is one of the value-points of PR, and people do tend to rely on articles they read about a product or service more than they do what an actual salesperson says, unless you play the advisory salesperson role, which I often do.
People are smart. They like to make their own decisions. They do not like, nor will they allow anyone to make them feel as if they were manipulated, whether by a sales pitch or an advertisement. So the modern salesperson should also play the information distributor-broker, gatekeeper and salesperson role. This is where blogs come in.
Having successfully blogged for sales, I can tell you that they provide salespeople the following benefits:
(1) The open showing of product (and area, in my case) knowledge to clients and prospective clients, or prospective buyers.
(2) The ability to keep your "pipeline" full, simply by typing a few keystrokes and updating daily, or even weekly (this is how I remain No. 2 in Real Estate Popular and in Google's top 5 for certain keywords, and I pay $0 for Search Engine Optimization because the blogs I contribute to increase my ranking automatically). A blog allows you to link to your website within each post, automatically providing you higher search engine rankings. Your blog will automatically be highly ranked by most search engines, simply because they're able to be updated more often than say, your company website.
This will only prove successful if you use an automated lead gathering source, which should also be placed in your company website so salespeople can follow up with potential purchasers. Various real estate companies have included automated systems to generate leads for their agents, and quite successfully, but combining blogs with an automated lead generating system could also benefit numerous pharmaceutical companies, which more often than not compete with non-pharma companies for Internet sales (Viagra, Cialis Valium and many others can be found marketed by non-pharma-sanctioned sellers on the Internet, often at prices disallowing much if any profit to the companies making them). Some technology companies could also benefit. Here are a few who I would advise to use blogging in order to increase their sales numbers:
1. Tech Data - The world's second largest global distributor of electronic computer equipment could make its sales force both more efficient and increase its volume by implementing blogs into its sales and marketing strategy. Steve Raymund, blogging could increase your company's sales.
2. DELL - I think it's high-time that DELL CEO Michael Dell got a blog. By blogging regularly, people would contstantly stay tuned in, and when people are constantly attuned to your blog it's much easier to pitch your computers to them. After all, they've tuned into to your blog for weeks, so a simple mention without a pitch involved doesn't look like a sales pitch, but your sales sure do go up when you're blogging to a regular audience. I would even bet that people who buy their first DELL tune into Michael Dell's blog (if he does make one) and continue to buy DELL's because through the blog, Dell would be directly communicating with them. DELL could also give blogs to customers as a promotion, or a co-branding venture. Dude, get a blog!
3. Cars.com - Cars.com could use a blog to constantly communicate with prospective buyers and provide them with updated information that they can't get anywhere else. That way it allows the company to build brand wareness while providing their potential customers with free information, so when it comes time to purchase a car, Cars.com would have already earned their trust, and they can search for cars anytime by the search tool implemented into your blog after it's created, assuming Cars.com does create one.
Any company with an Internet presence with lead generating or e-commerce tools will more often than not benefit from a blog. Why?
Blogs provide a constant source of information, so you can, in a sense, become the expert that people used to depend on newspaper columnists and salespeople to be, but many of them now often read the columnists, as well as five to nine blogs daily. Most professionals are experts in their field, so getting a blog simply allows a professional person, sales or otherwise, to showcase their expertise to the world.
Bill Gates, who is rumored to be getting a blog soon, has come to realize this rather self-evident truth. Blogs can easily make a CEO an expert because of two things: A CEO's expertise and the newspaper column likeness of a blog. This makes it easy for CEOs to communicate with three stakeholders: (1) The media, (2) Company shareholders and (3) Current and potential customers.
I track my blog visitors daily, and there are instances when St. Petersburg Times staff writers have visited, just days before a similar newspaper story to my blog posts was published in the Times. Journalists often get story ideas from blogs, and sometimes blogs themselves become stories.
Of course, with a blog you can also become part of the media landscape. Take Hundred Acres, for example. Its contributing writers are real estate agents and bloggers, but the posts typically read like brief news or magazine articles. Some bloggers are also selling ads using their blogs, Nick Denton's Gawker being one of the most successful ones. Hundreds of thousands of people flock to Gawker daily. What if a CEO received that kind of attention?
Then he, or she, would have to have a blog. CEOs can easily and inexpensively create brand awareness, show their expertise to the world and retain customer and stockholder satisfaction, on top of communicating regularly with the media, all with a blog. Publishing a book is still optional, but not always as necessary, because blogs often tell the stories of our lives, and those often are the most interesting to read.
Author: John Mudd | Jul 13, 04 | Permalink
| 3 comments
Category: @ John Mudd | Topic 2 Corporate Blogging
Global PR blogger: AKA "How can corporations use blogs to sell more shit to people without the bloggers catching onto the fact that they are being used as shills."
ARGHHHGH! I just read this article and frankly it makes me want to vomit. Maybe because I was starting to feel like blogs were the last best hope of keeping the media honest. Or I saw them as a personal expression method that people could use to make a viewpoint known. But just like the web, just like email, corporate interests want to get their grubby hands on them and squeeze the very life out of them so they can sell more shit. I'm so tired of unrestrained corporations wanting to control everything they touch.
Yesterday, I saw ads for a TV show spray painted on the sidewalk. The day before I read obviously fake glowing reviews for the same TV series in a blog reviewing TV series. As I did more research I spotted several other similar comments on blogs reviewing TV shows. Wow! Way to generate fake buzz people!! I'm sure they are proud of themselves. “Our fake posts in 23 blogs resulted in a creation of over 3.9 positive impressions for your series. Please send your check to Blog Whores for Corporations Inc.”
The people doing this are the same people who jumped onto Viral marketing (which I always thought was an appropriate name. “ Hey, watch this you idiot, it will make you sick!). Luckily those blog posters were too stupid to be subtle, but I'm sure that like fake grassroots campaigns they will figure out how to hype something without looking like the shills they are.
You have decided that blogs are yet another medium to sell product and services to people. Like email, you will eventually practically destroy the medium in your effort to co opt it for your corporate funders. Maybe people will be able to see through your efforts, but I doubt it.
There are no ethical guidelines for you, there is no tradition or rules that say you need to identify who you are, what you say and what you are attempting to do with your blog.
So ask yourselves this question "corporate bloggers", how far am I willing to go to exploit other blogs? Fake posts? Fake grass roots comments? What about your own corporate blogs? Will you censor comments that you don't like? Ban posts that don’t agree with your views? Will you agree to demands not to reveal the truth about a product or service that kills someone? Just what are your limits? Or does anything go as long as it is 1000 characters or less?
Just because you can do this does it mean you should?
Posted by: spocko at July 13, 2004 05:07 PM
Dear spocko, how unhappy you sound.
Yes we live in a commercial world where most people make their living selling products and services to other people. Either products and services they make themselves or those made by other people.
There are ways of avoiding this fact of modern existence of course.
You can live off taxpayer funds (ie money gouged from people who sell products and services for a living). Or you could get someone else to sell the products and services you make and tut-tut about it and pretend you're not involved in the whole sordid business.
Selling, of course, is as old as civilisation. The sinews and shapes of our civilisation - think trade routes and market towns - have long reflected the constant need to bring buyers and sellers/producers together.
Of course, there has always been resistance to this commercial focus of civilisation. The medieval church outlawed usury and then forced Jews to do this unavoidable work, and then accused them of evil. Go figure. For a long-time the european aristocracy thought itself above this dreadful commercialisation but soon had to get over its squeamishness. Read Lampedusa's The Leopard or see the movie to get the flavour of this.
Meanwhile, bankers underwrote that great flowering of civilisation the Italian Renaissance.
I could go on for pages in this vein but let's return to the immediate point.
Selling is inevitable, in mass societies that means marketing is inevitable. In democracies, mass societies and mass media also make PR inevitable. Its all down to freedom and competition, I'm afraid.
Some of us hereabouts think like you that a lot of this advertising and PR has outlived its usefulness and people are increasingly resisting it. Its too ubiquitous, too much push, too obvious, too exploitative. It relies too much on 'shocking' people to get attention. Most people over the age of thirty ignore this sort of advertising completely, by that age most of us have learnt to question and to research.
I'm 50 later this year and I refuse to buy any product that is 'pushed' at me - just because I can.
Blogs may offer a better way of bringing buyers and sellers together. Something more akin to an online version of pre-modern markets and taking some of the excesses of mass marketing out of the equation and using the medium to create more information-rich and conversational communication styles. The sort of thing a jaded 50-year old might find useful.
I think that's a great opportunity.
What's the alternative - more and more inane advertising and tricky things like viral marketing and 'spin'.
I hope we're right about blogging otherwise its just more of the same I'm afraid.
Posted by: Trevor Cook at July 13, 2004 07:58 PM
Spocko,
I understand your frustration. Keep in mind that blogs are a medium, and just like many people sift through numerous newspapers, TV shows and magazines daily, they also can do this with blogs (I've been doing it for years). Also, remember, that even the earliest of bloggers in most cases are selling a product, or ad space. There are also journalist-run blogs, as well. Those are typically purely informational, with a slant that may not fit a news article.
Corporate blogs would only target certain audiences, which means you would likely be unaffected by them, since you're not into that sort of thing. Of course, just as numerous blogs and Web magazines (which are simply glamorized blogs that sell advertising) post about items in the news media, they would (and some do) also likely post items from corporate blogs. The most successful blogs, though, are those run by an individual who directly communicates with his or her audience via e-mail or comments.
Radio was underground in its early days, too, until a corporation started pushing it and selling ads during air time, which caused it to explode. Of course, many of us still enjoy the entertainment and even news that broadcast media corporations broadcast on the airwaves every day. If we enjoy it, they profit from it. When they profit they hire people for jobs, which allows all of us to eat, which I don't think is a bad thing.
Blogs still are the best non-corporate media source out there, but some currently do use blogs (although sometimes you wouldn't realize it's a corporate CEO's blog, until you see that it is) and while some may eventually become corporate (i.e., Gawker, Google Blog, Vordel's CEO's blog, etc.), and some may even become small businesses run by one to four people (i.e., Blogcritics, Hundred Acres, etc.), they will likely remain as such. Some of them may not even make a profit, and those who don't, like any publication, could easily cease publication.
In a free society everyone needs to communicate freely. Blogs allow everyone to do that, regardless of who you are - corporation, publisher or just an opinonated individual who's looking to influence politics, cosumerism or culture in his or her part of the globe. That's the beauty of blogs. Anyone and everyone can have one and anyone and everyone can blog, but those with a strong purpose have the most staying power.
Not every blog out there will be for everyone, but if it satisfies its readers, it will likely achieve success. I have represented corporations and purchasers of some very high-end real estate in various real estate transactions, which would never have happened without my blog.
Thanks so much for your comments. Take care and have a wonderful day!
Posted by: John Mudd at July 14, 2004 09:43 AM
- About
- The Global PR Blog Week 1.0 is an online event that will engage PR, marketing and business bloggers from around the globe in a discussion about blogging and communications. The event is scheduled for July 12 - 16, 2004.
- Links
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- Rick Barry on A Very Brief Look at Blogging for the Uninitiated Executive
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- Kevin O'Keefe on How to launch a corporate blog for a professional services organization
- William Luu on Site Statistics and Trends
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