THE BLOGGING CASE STUDIES CONCLUSIONS

We interviewed six selected bloggers over the telephone to gain insight into each company's blogging strategies. Specifically we asked questions about each company's efforts towards product development and open transparency. The companies included in the case studies are:

• Annie's Homegrown
• IBM
• iUpload
• Macromedia
• Maytag
• Microsoft

ANNIE'S HOMEGROWN – The new Annie's Homegrown blog is a character blog. Where the blog has discussed products and asked for feedback, the blog has generated a great deal of customer response. The company's blog is less active than others we profiled, with only 17 entries over 5 months. Most of the feedback has been received through comment links on the blog.

iUPLOAD – iUpload is a small software company, and has a blog for every employee in the company. One blogger wrote about their customers' ideas and posted them, and they also pick a customer of the month to be profiled. Both strategies received a good response from the blog's audience. When asked if iUpload blogs had been successful, the bloggers gave feedback that they were a success. We consider that one reason for the success in terms of search engine rankings comes from the number of blogs within the company and how the many different blogs help with back linking.

IBM – Customers do not give product feedback on IBM developerWorks blogs. Our IBM blogger reported examples of product feedback were not available and IBM developerWorks blogs have not seen improvements in their products or services from blog comments by customers. In addition, our IBM blogger reported product builders or executives currently do not currently publicly blog at IBM as far as he was aware. Based on the interview with the IBM blogger it appears, IBM developerWorks blogs are not following a product development blogging content strategy currently; IBM developerWorks blogs current blogging strategy is one of thought leadership. The thought leadership content strategy still brings success to IBM's blogging efforts.

Blog content is dependant upon the writer of the content and what is being discussed on the blog. According to the IBM blogger interviewed IBM developerWorks does not have its product builders blogging and they are not using the content strategy of writing articles about products and encouraging customer feedback.

MAYTAG – The Maytag SkyBox Blog gives customers a place to focus on customer service at Maytag. The blog effectively leaves an online record of any customer service comments that can be reviewed by future customers over time at a blog.

Through the use of blogs, Maytag's product design team has received more product feedback than they have from any other communications channel, plus customer feedback was given directly to the design team with no filtering. Maytag's content strategy of asking for product feedback makes customers feel more engaged in getting the products they would like to buy, and because the exchange of customer ideas takes place on such a public forum every customer understands that Maytag wants to get input on their products.