Feedster CEO writes about turning on customers to your brand through blogs.

Robert Manning wears his org chart on his sleeve in Blogging is Not Fundamental. He's quite right to point out that many second-generation dotcoms have yet to prove their staying power, but his focus on blogs for online marketing is misplaced. Blogs work beautifully as conversation, customer support and as entertainment -- but they fail utterly as infomercials. Employee blogging, official or unofficial, will influence the quality of customer relationships -- not radically change the quantity of them. Demand creation and lead generation will still be handled in other ways.

Blogging itself is the leading indicator of what customer interaction will be like in an always-on internet world, where customers must be listened to because they are easily able to listen to each other. It is easier to find out what individual shippers think of UPS compared to FedEx than it is for me to find the official UPS position on the topic. Treating the broadband-connected customer as a consumer of information, viewer of keywords and clicker of links will be a market-share losing strategy in two or three years.

We should focus on blogs in crisis communications and blogs as an advertising medium. Before we can be very effective, we'll likely need to educate those around us as to the nature of blogging as a medium. The most common misconception among corporate communications and marketing groups is that their blogs need to be fascinating, or interesting, or controversial. The only things required are that they be timely, give the reader some mechanism for feedback and that they meet the expectations set by their authors. If your local car dealer wants to start a blog that lists this week's specials, that is completely appropriate as long as he sets expectations, meets them and responds when he hears feedback from his readers. That latter circumstance is the most important. In each of our businesses, our customers and potential customers want things from us that they are not yet getting. If we give them a public, timely forum based on internet standards (as opposed to proprietary message boards common over the last ten years), they will tell us exactly what we can do to sell to them more effectively.

Having a boring but extant blog has another, less obvious benefit, which is where crisis communications comes in. Every company needs a place for bloggers to show up when things go wrong as they inevitably do. Minutes after a crisis starts, the "boring" blog described above can include a message from the company CEO that bloggers can easily find. It can, after corporate counsel quickly views the text, explain how to trust UPS with tonight's shipment regardless of the 3.9 million customer data sets that UPS recently helped Citibank lose. UPS would have had a critical voice in the ensuing internet conversation if searching Google or Feedster for "UPS blog" had turned up anything that appeared relevant. Not only do experienced and influential bloggers use blog-specific search engines like Feedster but also, more importantly, blogs confuse Google's underlying math and appear a lot more important than they are in Google’s search results.

In their better-than-most article on blogging, BusinessWeek carefully avoided saying that blogs changed online marketing -- but instead that blogs are changing online business. Specifically, the only place BusinessWeek even mentioned marketing was to point out the lack of it:

"The bigger point, which is blindingly obvious when you think about it, is that the dotcom era was powered by companies -- complete with programmers, marketing budgets, Aeron chairs, and burn rates. The masses of bloggers, by contrast, are normal folks with computers: no budget, no business plan, no burn rate, and -- that's right -- no bubble."

Blogs are also starting to come into their own as an advertising medium., particularly ads placed within RSS feeds. The frequency and tone of the ongoing dialog between a blogger and her subscribers is a great platform on which to layer relationship-driven marketing messages.

The success of corporate blogs cannot simply be measured in clicks and registrations or purchases, they must be measured in the tiny increments that either turn customers on to your brand -- or turn them off. Your most vocal advocates and detractors use blogging technologies effectively. Join them.
 
Scott Rafer is president and CEO of Feedster, a fast-growing blog search engine and advertising network. Feedster delivers more relevant, and timely information by continuously collecting data from nearly seven million RSS content feeds. Before Feedster, Rafer co-founded WiFinder, the Wi-Fi hotspot directory; BookBroadband, the broadband hotel finder; Fresher Information, RSS indexing way too early; and FotoNation, a creator of connected photography solutions.

Previously, Rafer led the internet products group at Kodak Hollywood and worked in investment banking at Needham & Company. For school, Rafer graduated from the Management of Technology program at the University of Pennsylvania.

Rafer's blogs are License-Exempt Soweto and, at Feedster.