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Blogging for Big (and Small) Brands a la Forrester
October 06, 2005
Last week, Mickey Khan at Direct Marketing News wrote a nice summary of a presentation by Forrester Research's Charlene Li at Forrester's Consumer Forum 2005.
The topic was what blogs, RSS feeds, and search engines mean to popular brands. The short answer is, "They require marketers to give up a degree of control."
No big surprise there, but Li gave a nice weather report for companies thinking about venturing out into RSS feeds or even a corporate blog presence, offering several tips. Note that these tips correspond to both blogging and/or RSS content distribution.
- Open a dialog. Sounds simple, but you'd be surprised. Turn your comments feature on. Otherwise, it's just another web site.
- Don't be fake. Be honest and open or don't even bother. This doesn't mean talk about things that "Legal" wouldn't want you to, but it's better to avoid a topic entirely than to pretend to discuss it and dance around it.
- Give customers some control over content distribution. Li uses the example of Apple offering multiple feeds, based on niche interest.
- Offer consumers some form of efficacy. Li's example of Burger King's Subservient Chicken was a bit extreme and probably irrelevant to most companies, but the point remains: Offer some gesture to show consumers that you're listing to them.
- Admit mistakes. Well sure, it was bound to bleed over from politics. It's not the sin, it's the cover-up. Li's point is that consumers are surprisingly forgiving if companies approach a mistake with honesty and humility.
No rocket science anywhere up there, right? But that's Li's point. There are so many companies doing this wrong - by missing these simple points, thinking that the basic rules of communication don't apply to them - that the fundamentals need to be repeated.
The second half of the article is also worthwhile reading, as Li discusses how brands can get started if they're new to the concept of consumer dialog.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at October 6, 2005 08:03 AM
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