Bugger bloggers
Bottom line – it doesn’t matter who you are, what you do, how insignificant you think your life is or how much under the radar you think your business is – someone somewhere is or has talked about you.
Bugger bloggers
Right, so that means all these social tools, blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn have people talking about you or your business – you’re choosing to ignore it and plead ignorance by burying your head in the sand – it’ll go away, no one will notice – WRONG! You do a search to look up a person or company and you find everything, all the bad stuff, the cock-ups, the horrendous mistakes that nearly cost you your job or company. So clearly the answer is to do what?
Get a blog people! Why? I don’t have the time you say… right, you have the time to build the company improve it’s reputation with the people you meet but not the ones who do their research and look you up online who are going to hesitate before possibly engaging – and there’s nothing current except some elderly testimonials on a website that’s well out of date.
The only answer to protect your business is open it up to comment – be proud of what you’ve achieved, boast about it, get clients to write pieces for you and you for them, milk your transparency and use it as a selling tool – hell I do, I command a decent rate for providing seminars around the country on this stuff all because of this blogging lark.
But your business isn’t sexy or exciting to anyone but a very few, you produce moulded plastic cable ties; who in their right mind is going to read about that sort of drivel? Listen if a blog exists purely to discuss the merits of curdled milk … you can write about anything. One thing I would ask however is get bloody passionate – and I don’t mean use lots of expletives – it’ll soon become clear that you know and love your subject – your potential customers will soon pick up on it and reaslise you have a company that’s at least worthy of a visit!
Oh and another thing, don’t just cover yourself by registering a blog and cutting and pasting copy from your website into it – people are not daft they’ll see right through it, and it needs at least a weekly addition – daily brings amazing traction, that’s when it starts to overtake the website and become an SEO tool of massive proportions – yes the search engines love live fresh content – another reason for committing to a blog – corporate or otherwise.
This is not a sales pitch by the way but I know a man that can help if you need some guidance in that area… and do get some guidance, remember you are leaving a legacy.