Tuesday, March 01, 2005

The WSJ on SMBs and Blogging

From the ongoing (and going and going) discussion on business and blogs, The Wall Street Journal has a nice article today on how small companies are using weblogs to get intimate with their customers. And that's really the point, isn't it? That despite the distance between our physical selves and our customers' physical selves, the Net can be our liaison for intimacy.

While the discipline of Public relations is necessary and fundamental for building brand awareness, private relations are mandatory for engaging customers, employees, partners, enemies, fans, and (one hopes) enemies-turned-fans.
Some eight million Americans now publish blogs and 32 million people read them, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. What began as a form of public diary-keeping has become an important supplement to a business's online strategy: Blogs can connect with consumers on a personal level -- and keep them visiting a company's Web site regularly.
I have always preached that business people throw their business cards away when they're blogging. Don't blog from your business card title. Blog as a human being with genuine interests who happens to work someplace FIRST. And please, take some risks.

Stonyfield Farms' CEO Gary Hirshberg enjoys the closeness the company's weblogs provide. [[Check out baby babble, for example]]:
Communication through a blog is "as intimate and personal as somebody sitting in your kitchen," Mr. Hirshberg says. "It's a great privilege to be able to have that kind of dialogue."
Other good quotes:
"'It's a new way of communicating, rather than marketing,' says Charlene Lee, an analyst at Forrester Research. Like other forms of publishing, blogs attract the largest audiences when they avoid overt commercialism and deliver compelling and credible content, Ms. Lee says."
Except, Ms. Lee's name is spelled Li, and she blogs here.