If You Have Not Started A Corporate Blog Then Please Pay Attention
Remember the bad old days. If you received poor service from an organisation, ultimately your only chance of getting a satisfactory response would be to write to customer services.
Then, if you were lucky, one day, someone tucked away in some forgotten part of the organisation would write you back. The letter would arrive in the standard format replete with the requisite clichés and platitudes, saying how grateful they were for your custom, had done all they could to respond to your concerns, and hoped that the matter was now settled.
In the end, you would be left holding nothing more valuable than the paper on which the letter was written.
Some would say that for many organisations, those bad old days still exist – and that is the truth. However, some organisations are adopting a more enlightened approach. The emergence and rise of corporate blogging is ensuring that every aspect of an organisation’s customer service is now open for public consideration, discussion, debate, and action.
In its 2005 Survey of Corporate Blogging, Backbone Media concluded that those organisations that had a well thought-out strategy, be they large or small, were enjoying significant improvements in customer services, customer relationships, marketing, and sales.
The corporate blog is also more than useful for product development, as many software companies are finding out.
Consequently, organisations that have not seen it fit to engage in blogging are not only failing to take advantage of one of the most important developments in customer relationship management, they are handing an advantage to their competitors.
The corporate blog is entirely consistent with the very essence of The Human Asset Manifesto – that an organisation’s human assets are both internal and external, and that both clients and the wider community are critical elements in that equation. It reflects the human and social changes within society; the need to be heard, to contribute, and to get value for money.
Those organisations that continue to ignore the potential value of this particular asset do so at their own peril. The world will be busy passing them by.
couldn't agree more, if your company dares to get feedback from your customers and enact their suggestions. Not only do you improve the product but your customers become evanglists. Thanks for mentioning my report from 2005.
Posted by: John Cass | November 28, 2006 at 02:55