No Longer ‘Next Big Thing,’ Blogs Still Key Part of Social Media Strategy

In social media years, blogs are practically ancient. The term “weblog,” later shortened to blog, dates all the way back to 1997. 

Technorati now tracks more than 112 million blogs, meaning they are clearly no longer “the next big thing.” Much of the social media buzz is now devoted to social networks like Facebook, which recently announced its membership had grown to 200 million, and Twitter, a micro-blogging site which attracted 7 million unique visitors in February, according to Nielsen Online. (Micro-blogging is a blogging variant that limits authors to 140-character missives.) 

Yet many companies see blogs as a sort of senior statesman of social media, one that is central to their strategies of fostering closer relationships with their customers, rather than a medium with waning influence. In fact, they use newer channels such as Twitter to promote their blogs. 

In the early part of the decade, social media activity centered around blogs because “that’s where the conversations were happening,” says Paul Chaney, president of the International Blogging and New Media Association and author of the blog Conversational Media Marketing. “Conversations are more distributed now, but blogs are like a base of operations from which you foray into other channels.” 

All of the companies interviewed for this piece support this view. They agree that, compared to channels like Facebook and Twitter, blogs offer companies more ownership and control of their brands. Twitter, with its length limit of 140 characters, doesn’t lend itself to the types of involved discussions that are possible on blogs. Because blogs are also more easily accessed by Google and other search engines, they boost a company’s profile through search engine optimization. 

“Our blogs are home base. Whether I am on Facebook or Twitter or any other social site, most of my conversation is still going to happen on the corporate blog,” says Bryan Rhoads, a digital strategist with Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence. 

“Companies that are focused on joining conversations with customers are going to communities that already have customer bases and becoming relevant in those conversations,” says Bob Pearson, president of the Blog Council and former vice president of Communities and Conversations at Dell. They can then direct those customers to their blogs, which are “the ultimate story-telling mechanism.”

How do these companies and others position their blogs in an ever-shifting social media landscape? 

Dell 

The PC manufacturer started a blog program in July of 2006, at the behest of CEO Michael Dell, in response to its then well-documented struggles with declining customer satisfaction levels. The company spent a few months reading “thousands and thousands” of posts before publishing a post of its own. This research not only gave Dell a sense of how to “blogify” content, it helped the company develop a plan for solving the tech support issues for its products. 

“You can be as transparent and conversational as possible, but if you don’t get the right people and processes in place that are committed to actually helping customers, it won’t do you a bit of good,” says Chief Blogger Lionel Menchaca. 

Menchaca typically identifies an owner or co-owners of a blog, who become responsible for that blog’s content. About 100 employees contribute to Dell’s 15 blogs (four of which are in languages other than English), estimates Menchaca. 

Some of the keys to the blogs’ success: providing a basic training course for all beginning bloggers, enlisting “passionate” employees, and conducting weekly content meetings during which core bloggers compare notes on relevant activities within Dell, comments of Dell blog readers and trends being discussed in the broader blogosphere. 

“We try to balance all three of these content areas,” says Menchaca. “We’re most effective when we strike that balance. If we lean too heavily on what Dell bloggers want to talk about, (the blogs) can become a one-way microphone rather than a conversation.” 

Other channels complement blogs rather than compete with them, says Menchaca. Each Dell blog has a complementary Twitter account. Menchaca oversees the account for the Direct2Dell blog, which has nearly 5,000 followers. Popular posts are often “re-Tweeted” (posted on other Twitter accounts). Though that kind of republication can occur via Google Reader or RSS feeds, Menchaca says “there is more sharing” on Twitter. 

The biggest challenges around a broad social media strategy involve connecting the various channels, both to “bring content from all of our channels to different audiences as it becomes relevant to them” and to help Dell plumb the decentralized content for insights. It’s also tough simply making time to devote to all of the core channels, says Menchaca.

Lenovo 

Lenovo launched its first blog, Design Matters by David Hill, vice president of Design, in June of 2006. Since then, the program has expanded to encompass eight blogs. Ray Gorman, the company’s executive director of External Communications, had to recruit bloggers initially. But thanks to internal promotion of the blogs, including posting them on the company intranet, employees now often ask to blog. The main criteria: enthusiasm and a commitment to keep content fresh and oversee comments. 

Lenovo looks at a number of traditional Web metrics, including unique visits, page views, Technorati rankings and RSS subscriptions, to assess the popularity of its blogs. Gorman pays a lot of attention to ratio of comments and the number of words in comments, which he says indicate a high level of reader engagement. When Hill recently asked his readers what features they’d like to see in a ThinkPad netbook, he received 80-plus comments in one week, some of them nearly 1,000 words long. 

“We pride ourselves on having a technically astute customer base. By offering them this platform, we give them an opportunity to share their expertise with us. That’s invaluable. You can host focus groups at great expense, you can run online surveys, you can do a lot of polling, but you won’t get the kind of rich stuff (you will get from blog comments),” says Gorman. 

Like Menchaca, Gorman sees “great symbiosis” between Levono’s blogs and their supporting Twitter accounts. Lenovo closely monitors Twitter for any signs of customer dissatisfaction and increasingly for what Gorman calls “detection of desire.” So, for instance, Lenovo can enter into a dialogue with customers who might be Tweeting about shopping for a laptop. 

On Twitter and in blogs, Gorman says it’s important to inject some personality into communications. “If all I see from one of my favorite brands is coupons, coupons, coupons, it’s really of no interest. I take more interest in seeing a brand with a personality behind it reach out and say ‘Hey we’re sorry your flight is delayed. Here’s the reason why’ and offer to help,” he says. “If all you do is promote, it starts to get the look and feel of a microphone.”Understanding the roles different channels play is a key challenge in social media strategy, says Gorman. “We are all guilty at some times of saying, ‘Oh, it’s social media.’ But there are subtleties in the different channels, and you need to understand those if you want to communicate effectively.” 

Intel 

Intel’s blogging program started with internal employee blogs but added public-facing blogs in 2007. The first public blog involved Intel’s own IT department sharing its best practices. This “from the trenches” approach remains popular, with the company’s latest blog featuring employees blogging about their jobs in hopes of attracting talented hires. 

“The strategy has always been to get our employees talking, not just use the blogs as a broadcast vehicle for marketing or PR. So we have a lot of our internal experts sharing what they know, “ Rhoads says. 

One of Intel’s biggest challenges is tweaking its site design so that readers can more easily locate posts of interest, he says. “We have so many conversations going on, we need to find better ways to help folks find that information. I don’t think you’re entirely aware of the huge information pyramid you’re at the top of when you visit the blog home page.” 

Like Lenovo’s Gorman, Rhoads says it’s important to differentiate between channels and craft appropriate strategies for each. “If you’re on a Facebook fan page or application, that’s different from a Twitter conversation with me or my peers, which is different than the blogs.” 

Smaller companies face different challenges than Intel, which because of its market position was pretty sure it could build a blog program and expect folks to come, acknowledges Rhoads. Echoing the comments of The Blog Council’s Pearson, he says SMBs should reach out first to their customers on sites like Facebook. 

“Are (your customers) engaged in existing communities? You don’t have to build it. The point is participation and getting out there and communicating with customers wherever they are. If you are well engaged in those places, then maybe it is time to have a corporate blog,” he says. 

SAP 

SAP employs a different blog strategy, centered around a virtual community in which partners, customers and other external sources outnumber SAP employees. Only about a third of the 4,800 bloggers in the network work for the company, says Mark Yolton, senior vice president of the SAP Community Network. A developer network, begun when SAP introduced its NetWeaver middleware in 2003, predated the broader network. 

Anyone can read the blogs, though one must become a community member to post comments or apply to write a blog. (The five-minute registration process involves filling out an online form, says Yolton.) 

“We have lot of smart people at SAP, but we don’t have all of the smart people. We want to hear insights from others, especially from our customers and partners,” says Yolton. “Maybe a manufacturer in Mexico can help a chemical company in India apply some operational best practices or use their SAP software in a different way.” 

There’s an online form where any community member can apply to become a blogger. If an application is approved, the member becomes a “junior” blogger, whose posts are moderated more closely than those of “expert” bloggers. Junior bloggers also receive basic instruction on how to use the blogging tools and some tips on tone and content. (The latter is especially helpful for bloggers who are not native English speakers, Yolton says, a key consideration for a multinational company like SAP.) 

When expert bloggers click “publish,” their posts go live immediately. Some of the experts are ultimately asked to serve as moderators who vet the contents of junior blogger posts and upgrade junior bloggers to expert status. Most blogs are viewed once live by SAP employees who can respond quickly to issues if needed. Any community member can flag posts as inappropriate or questionable, and flagged posts receive review priority. However, says Yolton, bloggers are never censored except to ensure their topics are relevant to the community. 

Like the other sources featured in this article, Yolton says blogs provide a more robust reading experience than Twitter and other channels. “Blogs are a freeform medium in which you can express opinions, experiences and insights in a much richer way than you could through Twitter or other channels.”