Blogs are the New Comment Card – How to Use Them to Grow Your Business

There are many excellent tools you hold in your arsenal when it comes to social customer relationship management, or CRM. One that has the potential to be highly effective is your blog. Not only is a blog the perfect platform for sharing information about your business and your products, but it also provides a unique opportunity to invite the audience (in this case, your readers) to participate in the business by sharing their opinions and giving feedback, making suggestions, or discussing products and services with other readers.

In this way, visitors to your blog can feel invested in your business and its success. Another good way to drive this emotional attachment to your business is to offer games and contests on the blog. Blogging presents a wonderful way for a company to build its brand in a less formal setting than the company Web site, advertising campaigns, or other venues.

Visitors to your blog can leave comments describing their personal experiences with the product, their observations, tips and tricks for using the product or solutions they may have stumbled on to common problems, feedback and suggestions for improvements to current products or new products.

The possibilities for comments, links, trackbacks, and buzz to be stirred by blog posts new and old alike are nearly infinite. The good news about blogs is that you do not have to constantly feed them new information in order to keep them relevant. You can use CRM software and schedule regular releases of information or you can post daily. It really is your decision how little or how much time you want to invest in building your blog. You can also invite various people from within your organization to be guest bloggers, so that readers can get the “inside scoop” from the CEO, the CFO, the tech guys, the marketing execs, or whoever you think may have a valuable perspective to share with customers.

When you use a blog as a comment card, be sure to offer visitors multiple options to make their presence felt. You can do this by opening comments to all visitors, providing an anonymous comment box, providing live chat, and of course providing other contact options, such as E-mail, for those who wish to get in touch with your company but without going through the public sphere..

You can also invite visitors to participate in polls and surveys that will provide you with information about them, and what they would like to see from your company by way of products, customer service, and innovations. If you make them feel as though they are truly an important part of your innovation and design efforts, they will participate freely and be excited about sharing the finished product when the time comes.

Blogging can provide a company yet another outlet, and one that’s less stuffy or less formal than the corporate website. On a blog, you can truly reach out and engage the customer in a casual, entertaining way. The possibilities provided by establishing a presence for your business in the blogosphere simply aren’t possible with any other venue, and that’s just one of the reasons that blogs are the new comment card.

This entry is filed under Social Enterprise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.