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January 30, 2006Deciding Who Should Write a Blog In A Software Company
To determine who should write your company’s blog, ask yourself whom your customers most want to chat with when your company has to do a sales presentation? Your answer will probably be the person who can answer a customer’s questions about how to get the most out of your application.
If you provide very complex software, where developers are using the application or toolset, the developers probably most want to chat with your chief developer or the CTO. If you have a business application, it’s the product manager or customer service manager. The person who should blog is the person who can actually teach your customers how to use your application and get the most out of its use.
Are you concerned that your CTO and product manager does not have time to blog, that they are too busy preparing presentations, writing white papers, and talking to customers?
That’s the point! Technology is important, and time needs to be spent developing your application, but to build really successful software, you have to talk with customers about their needs. While to sell software and retain customers a company has to start and continue a dialogue with their customers. A blog is a website that allows you to have a dialogue with an audience, either directly by general posts, or by giving an audience the ability to see the interaction between the blogger and one reader at a time.
I like to imagine and compare the process of blogging to a CTO of a software company chatting with their firm’s largest customers on the telephone, except in this case, 5,000 people are listening in on the call through the benefit of blogging.
A blog takes the expertise of your product builders and customer communicators and puts it on for display for the entire world to see. With a blog your entire audience can learn from your expert's knowledge directly by reading the blog, and your audience learns how your company deals with people by how your blogger connects with your audience.
If you had to give a presentation to your most important customer, would you send a ghostwriter, or your public relations director? No, I think not. Consider who the experts are in your software company, and encourage them to write your company’s blog.
Posted by johncass at January 30, 2006 10:25 PM
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