Note to CMO: Blogging and Bathwater

Dear CMO:

I would need a ladder to climb out of the clutter in my inbox today. It seems that the marketing pundits have gathered around the dubious cause of "blogging for business" like it was global warming or inoculating Africa or something.

You know how I always hate to rain on parades, but blogging is kind of like everything else in marketing. It's neither "good" nor "bad" on its own. What you say, how you say it, and to whom you address your clever phraseology generally spells out whether your marketing works or it doesn't.

Does "blogging for business" work for you? A few questions before we all jump in the bathwater together:

1. Do you have anything to say?

Honestly, if you're the Stride Gum Marketing Team, I'm not sure the blog is going to help. Do you have real content and knowledge to impart? Are you pulsing your market for new insights on a very frequent basis? Are you giving your reader something of value that they can't get from the same news sources you're pulling from? Great to know, but still not enough.

2. Is there anyone who actually cares about what you have to say?

Do you have highly involved customers making complex decisions on a routine basis? Are there high switching costs? Is the lifetime value of your customer significantly higher than a one-time purchase would indicate? Maybe blogging makes sense. Still not time to cannonball into blogging.

3. Does anyone actually read your stuff?

Curious thing about websites -- your customers don't go where you want them to go. They go where they want to go, they abandon shopping carts half-full but with the best of intentions, and are more interested in things like dealer locators and compatibility guides than your brilliant essays on what inspired you to add a few product features. Why won't they just do what we want!

4. Is there any reason to assume that this activity -- which will require not just your time, but other people's time -- is a good use of time?

Ah, the dreaded arrival of the ROI question that the pundits hate so much! Yes, your hobby has to make money or it's a waste of time. Pundits, please take note of this. You hate the ROI question because it quantifies the creativity you prize so much in yourselves. It's an objective brick through your subjective windshield.

If the first three tests are passed, then that's all ducky. But now that you've embraced the tar baby of business blogging, you need to do it every day, you need to tell the truth, you need to provide fresh insights and content, and you need to collect readers. Who's going to do this while you're doing your day job?

Does -- uh oh -- legal want to see this before it goes out? "Your honor, I didn't mean that we'd actually replace all those expensive products we shipped for the past six months when I said, 'we'll fix this problem right away -- right away! -- or my name isn't Captain Spaulding'. This happens so often it just makes you want to cry. Or laugh, depending on who does it. An associate of mine who shouldn't have been talking directly to consumers once told an irate videographer that, 'yeah, we'll take care of you', and then had to fork over $10,000 for a new camera out of his budget. Serves him right.

And now, back to you and your blog. What happens when people start talking back? And they're not happy? "All this customer dialog is just great!", the pundits cry, because they aren't fielding the emails. Be careful what you wish for, young Jedi.

Now you have to get customer service, product management, engineers, our pals in legal, and maybe a boss or two into the mix. Just curious, but what does all this cost the company in headcount? And what incremental benefit is this blog providing your shareholders? Do the math by dividing the big incremental value number by the small headcount expense number. At least, you hope it's the big divided by the small. Add on the irritation it's giving your CEO when the Chairman's wife's blog reply wasn't answered the way she liked, your own quickly shrinking day, and now -- and only now -- do you know whether this is a good idea or not.


Is "blogging for business" a good thing? Answer the above questions and decide for yourself.

If you have something to say, if your public finds this information meaningful and are subscribing to your feeds, if you're saving potentially lost customers, if you are creating a community of users whose interaction is positioning your company as a thought leader, if you have created the forum that your industry lacked before and you have truly and consistently provided trememdous and irreplacable value to the customer experience, and if you're managing the demands it will put on your system, the answer is a happy and emphatic "yes".

Make no mistake about it, though. You're showing up to work every morning to make your company more money. And if your activities aren't lined up with that simple priority, change your activities.

Blogging is lovely as long as it makes your customers, management, and shareholders happy.


Regards.

Copyright (c) 2006 Stephen Denny