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November 23, 2005Blog Marketing Produces T-Shirts and Traffic
Shel Israel interviewed Patrice Cassard who runs the blog, La Fraise, for a chapter on non-English blogs in his book Naked conversations. The interview really illustrates the power of blogging if a corporate blogger uses the right content strategy for their blog.
Patrice runs a blog about his T-Shirt business, except his business has become the blog, Patrice gets a lot of feedback from customers on how to design his products. The blog receives 300,000 unique visitors a month. Patrice receives this volume of visitors by letting his customers design the product Loic LeMeur, Six Apart’s EVP and FM for Europe, Africa and the Middle East uses Patrice’s example to explain how companies can get value from blogging, he states the “T-shirt guy realized very quickly through the comments that the customer had more ideas about the products than he did. It's not just about feedback. The customers design the product.�
The process of conducting blog marketing for product design and feedback lets companies design better products for their customers and produces promotional benefits as well. Quoting from the Backbone Media Study on corporate blogging.
“It's our hypothesis that discussing both company and customer thought leadership is the best way to build community.According to bloggers at Microsoft and Macromedia both companies are crossing a cultural divide, from a closed system in product development to one of openness and transparency. Our Macromedia blogger stated the company has already crossed that cultural chasm. Both Microsoft and Macromedia are getting tremendous benefits in marketing product development and marketing promotion. Literally, individual Macromedia customers believe Macromedia built and developed the product from their suggestion.
If you helped build a product as a customer you are much more likely to buy the product and tell your peers about the product. Here lies the online PR opportunity for corporate bloggers. The best ways to market a product are through customer referrals and good PR. Building a community of bloggers and online customers will increase the likelihood of online PR being generated on your audience's blogs as they will be discussing their ideas about your products. That online conversation about your company's products produces direct traffic and links back to a company blog and site, resulting in higher search engine rankings and more traffic.
Following Macromedia and Microsoft's examples and considering the survey overall, we recommend that companies when developing a blogging content strategy should encourage their product builders to blog and that they write about their products. Any thought leadership presented on the blog, should focus on the development of a company's product, and new ideas should come from both the blogger and from customers.“
Posted by johncass at November 23, 2005 10:42 AM
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