John Cass of Backbone Media relates how Macromedia's opening product development to bloggers created happier customers and higher web traffic.
How do you build a successful business blogging strategy? I'd suggest following Macromedia's strategy. I've looked at several large software companies and Macromedia appears to be getting the best results in terms of search engine rankings, traffic, community building, product feedback and suggestions from customers from amongst the software companies I recently interviewed them during the Backbone Media Corporate blogging survey. Here's the background to Macromedia's successful strategy:
Macromedia's blogs were started three years ago to build a better community and send information to customers more quickly than existing channels. Over time, Macromedia discovered that blogs could be used for the development of their products. This shift in product development thinking was gradual, and eventually a big change in thinking about the Macromedia product development happened.
Blogging has completely changed the way in which Macromedia conducts its software development process. Before blogs, Macromedia would not release any product information until two to three weeks before the release day. (This was how most of the software industry worked.) Software development was a relatively closed process for Macromedia: some feedback was gathered from customers, but a lot of the work was completed inside the company.
Now Macromedia is using blogs to query customers on product feedback.
Mike Chambers, senior product manager, developer relations, explained that the Macromedia software development process, "was a very closed process, the blogs made it a more open and transparent process." Chambers had been working on the Flash team for about eight months, and the he thought it was very important to be working directly with customers on the development of future release updates. Chambers said, "customers use [our products] more than we do; they know them better them we do; we wanted to tap into that."
Macromedia realized there were big benefits, and manageable risks to opening up the process of product development to their customer community. Internal blogs helped to evangelize the idea of using blogs to encourage feedback and suggestions from customers.
Customers responded to Macromedia's request for their feedback by commenting on Macromedia blogs, and also by posting on their own blogs then linking back to the original employee post. Macromedia's request for feedback turned more customers into customer evangelists. Slowly, through trial and error, Macromedia determined how best to make blogs work for them.
Macromedia developed the following rules of thumb for their blogging strategy:
- Only those employees who have something useful to contribute -- with relevant and quality content in terms of product information -- blog
- It's okay to personalize, but only about as much as their employees would in a face-to-face meeting; employee bloggers stick to product info.
- Product managers ask for feedback on products and request suggestions from customers
- If Macromedia cannot implement a product suggestion, then they explain why
- The company actively watches online conversations about Macromedia, and when they see something that solicits a response, a Macromedia employee responds
Macromedia built a news aggregator that now has over 500 blogs, including 50 to 60 Macromedia employee blogs.
There have been no major issues for Macromedia in terms of negative PR or competitive intelligence losses, and the whole process of using blogs to communicate with customers for the development of new products has been a success. That success has come in terms of better products, more committed customers, more sales, positive PR results and higher search engine rankings.
An important factor that determines the ranking of a web page in a search engine is the number of sites linking to a web page. One of the biggest benefits from blogs to Macromedia has come from the higher search engine rankings. The blog posts of 50 to 60 Macromedia blogs has meant the company has more content on the web. Furthermore, since the posts are valuable to Macromedia customers, the company's blogs receive links from customers when the customers in turn blog about or link to a Macromedia employee blog post.
Chambers explained, "Weblogs will appear first on search engines, even before our site, because of conversations, we were getting linked." Through online conversations, Macromedia's blogs are getting a lot of links, which in turn is giving Macromedia higher rankings and producing more traffic from search engines.
The Macromedia Blog Aggregator
Macromedia developed a blog aggregator early. The aggregator has been running for two years, the second version is six months old. The aggregator contains all 50 to 60 Macromedia employee blogs and over 400 customer blogs. Content is syndicated into the blog aggregator as bloggers post. To be accepted into the aggregator, a customer submits their site. The site is then reviewed for content. Once the site is accepted, Macromedia doesn't monitor the content.
Before the aggregator, the Macromedia blog communities had grown so quickly that both employees and customers had difficulty keeping up with the community. The aggregator enables Macromedia employees and customers to filter through what's most popular to find the content they want to read. Customers can subscribe to daily, monthly and category RSS feeds in the aggregator.
An issue arose in the first version of the aggregator: bloggers were categorizing blog posts on technical categories, but the posts were off topic, with social commentary not related to Macromedia products. While the information was valuable for community discussion, a lot of customers check the aggregator 10 to 15 times a day, so when off topic feeds were included it would hinder a customer's experience. Users wanted a way to focus on the Macromedia-related content.
Macromedia developed a type of category called smart categories. Smart categories index the posts, analyze the posts for keywords appearing on the page, and -- based on the conversation -- put the post into a smart category. The smart category feature can also exclude off topic posts, not including content, or contain other language Macromedia wanted to exclude. Macromedia maintained the existing regular categories for community continuity, but positioned the smart categories higher up the left hand navigation on the blog aggregator page.
In the latest version of the blog aggregator, Macromedia's traffic has risen dramatically. Most traffic to the aggregator does not come from search traffic, but blogger direct traffic from links and RSS readers pointing to the aggregator.
The company's goals are to send traffic to the employee blogs and to develop more customers. Macromedia has achieved this by engaging their community with blogs, who in turn write posts with links to Macromedia, resulting in overall Macromedia search engine rankings increasing and rising. The aggregator has played a part in that by giving tools to employees and customers so they can find the content they want on employee and customer blogs.
Macromedia's blog strategy is working.
John Cass is the Director of Internet Marketing Strategies for Backbone Media, Inc., a Search Engine Marketing and Web Design Agency based in Boston. Cass was lead author on "Corporate Blogging: Is It Worth the Hype?" a 70 page study and website on the value and benefits of corporate blogging. The study reveals how such companies as Microsoft, Macromedia and IBM are using blogging. A member of the American Marketing Association, Cass is the 2005/6 President of the Boston Chapter of the AMA. Cass has been blogging at his PR Communications blog since 2003 and now run's blogsurvey at Backbone Media.