Facing your Business Blog Outward
This week in Blogs and Wikis behind the Firewall and then Capturing Ideas behind the Firewall I’ve been trying to push an idea out to some businesses. That idea is you can do things differently and the world won’t come to an end. And the sub-heading of all that would be these are software applications and you can do with them what you like - blogs and wikis are business tools. Sometimes its easy to walk away thinking of them in terms of what other people do rather than their potential to forward our own objectives. Still, both articles were discussing inward facing blogs and wikis where you really have nothing to lose.
But why not look at outward facing blogs and wikis as well? The South by South West podcast of Charlene Li’s presentation - Social Strategies for Revolutionaries - is about the most relevant multimedia that I can push in your direction on this issue. With a few guidelines and some care to customer focus you can get amazing benefit from using a blog as an outward facing point of contact for your entire process. From suppliers to customers you have little to lose and everything to gain by bringing your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) out into the open.
The more you interact with your customers the better you can afford them adequate service. If you can read and react on your blog to customer complaints and suggestions then you’re going to win personal votes - change disgruntled people into adoring fans. Whereas simply ignoring complaints like you might currently do just makes the issues spread. Of course, you’re going to need a few policies in place and the right people in the firing line but you should be able to grasp how this will benefit your company.
Take that idea a step further again. What if your outward facing blog (call it a customer focused website rather than a blog) is there to engage people in conversation. How’s that for an idea? I mean you could think of it as a tool where you take feedback and offer supporting information to customers to enhance their experience with your company. Not in a marketing spiel but with some street cred - when you get called out admit it and move on. Your customer focused website becomes a communication conduit with a primary goal that is simply to build and maintain relationships with customers.
The simple truth of it all is that you can easily ignore this advice and not engage your customers. You can carry on pretending to face inward (which nobody really can do on the Web) thinking everything is going perfectly well. But you really have this opportunity to take my advice and get engaged with your customers. What do you really have to lose?
