Last Tuesday, the team at KoMarketing Associates had an opportunity to meet with John Cass, Marketing Strategist and Blogging Expert, to discuss strategy, ideas and technology related to business blogging. For those that don’t know, John Cass was the 2005/2006 President of the Boston Chapter of the American Marketing Association, is a research fellow and advisory board member for the Society of New Communications Research and has held senior positions in marketing, social media strategies and public relations.

Among the various topics of conversation shared, a few key points came out of the discussion that I found valuable to share. First, the creation of effective communication is one of the the most important components of a successful business blogging strategy. John was quick to mention the success of Dell, citing the emerging success of their customer oriented blog (and it’s new incarnation, Direct2Dell) designed to tackle customer support issues and communicate directly back to the consumer in regards to product enhancements and suggestions. Blogging is about communication through writing; with customers, readers and other bloggers.

Two Specific Blogging Recommendations
Here are two specific recommendations, based on the idea of effective communication in blogging strategy.

• On Commenting - possibly one of the most underrated components of a blog strategy when businesses enter the world of blogging, it’s so critical to represent oneself (or one’s business) through constructive and effective comments on blogs related to the industry or expertise. Quality comments will get your profile (and ultimately your blog) discovered. Readers (and blog authors) that read and value your comments will ultimately want to find out more about the commenter, which will lead them to your blog.
• On Blog Software - one thing that I had not considered a high priority when evaluating blog software was the functionality available that facilitates the communication process. For example, when we converted our blog over to the WordPress platform, two understated components of the software include the ability to add the various ping addresses of blog aggregators as well as WordPress’s automated functionality for sending trackbacks to applicable blogs referenced.

Despite a very hectic day at the office, the hour or so that we spent discussing the finer points of business blogging was both engaging and collaborative. I would recommend taking a few minutes to read through some of John Cass’s recent posts (including “Tips on Writing a Blog Post“) on his blog PR Communications, as well as checking out his new book on business blogging, “Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging”. (Review from Amazon)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 6:24 am and is filed under Blogging. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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