Article
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Blogging Success Story: Asking the Real Questions & Reaping the Rewards
Star Customer: Rick Short, Marcom Director for Indium Corporation. Check out the Indium blog here.
How has blogging improved your company's relationships with your customers?
Unlike emails, phone calls, site visits, or tech conference presentations, blogging is a form of regular publishing. Initially, this felt awkward for our staff of bloggers. The classic newbie questions abounded: "What do they want to read about?", "What's interesting to them?", and on and on.
To me, the fascinating element of this experience happened when we pushed through that level of thinking and started exploring OURSELVES. Once we started asking the REAL questions, we started reaping the rewards. We knew we had arrived when we began asking things like, "What do I want to write about?", "What's interesting to ME?", etc. That was when we learned that customers desire pure authenticity.
Customers don't want to read stuff from a person who is fishing around for things that customers want to read about. Customers, the ones that truly matter to an organization, want to read what turns on YOUR staff. The secret with this is hiring the industry's leading technologists and turning them lose. When that alignment is achieved, sparks fly. In our case, "sparks" equals self-qualified, highly-qualified, opt-in, urgent customer contact. We LOVE that!
How has blogging improved your company's relationships with your customers?
Unlike emails, phone calls, site visits, or tech conference presentations, blogging is a form of regular publishing. Initially, this felt awkward for our staff of bloggers. The classic newbie questions abounded: "What do they want to read about?", "What's interesting to them?", and on and on.
To me, the fascinating element of this experience happened when we pushed through that level of thinking and started exploring OURSELVES. Once we started asking the REAL questions, we started reaping the rewards. We knew we had arrived when we began asking things like, "What do I want to write about?", "What's interesting to ME?", etc. That was when we learned that customers desire pure authenticity.
Customers don't want to read stuff from a person who is fishing around for things that customers want to read about. Customers, the ones that truly matter to an organization, want to read what turns on YOUR staff. The secret with this is hiring the industry's leading technologists and turning them lose. When that alignment is achieved, sparks fly. In our case, "sparks" equals self-qualified, highly-qualified, opt-in, urgent customer contact. We LOVE that!
