Last Friday, I launched my first Blogging for Business seminar. This workshop has been in development for several months. And the response has been huge. There is such a great opportunity for South African businesses to benefit from blogging. A reminder to those who attended of the core benefits of blogging for business:
- Become the Expert: when blogging start with issues affecting your industry and use your experiences in your company as a ongoing case study. As you become a industry commentator your peers and people on the outside will start to look to your for guidance.
- Customer Relationships: this is where blogging can have the greatest benefit for very large companies. If you ever experienced high call volumes in a call centre, writing your feedback on a blog can help blow off some steam. Other clients can read the response from your company and may never have to call in with their complaints or feedback.
- Media Relations: When you issue a press release to the media in many cases the can edit it or rewrite it and certain important messages can be taken out of context. You can publish your media releases on your blog unedited. And your audience, clients, partners can get the story straight from the horse’s mouth as they say.
- Internal Collaboration: Again in very large companies or in virtual teams blogging the progress of a project can be invaluable way to communicate in a non-obtrusive manner. Project managers can keep track of the project progress without getting involved in calling meetings which only take people away from the projects they are working on.
- Knowledge Management: Information can be shared using blogging technologies like RSS to keep relevant people informed of updates.
- Recruitment: As you write about your industry and your company you can be seen as a open and attractive company to work for. Younger generation of employees are very intolerant of old fashioned bureaucratic ways of working.
- Test ideas or products: You can use your blog to communicate new products, features and updates. And you can get quick and instant feedback from your audience. This can be seen as a kind of co-development with prospective clients and they will help spread your word of mouth better than you could ever imagine.
- Rank high in Search Engines: The most obvious benefit from Blogging is how it boost search engine rankings. Search engines like Google love frequently updates web pages.