A lot of thoughts today on blogging as a way to bring an enterprise and its customers closer together. Building on the internal/external model of blogs, I think that blogs (and all social software) can bridge the gap in four different ways.
1) Enterprise to customers
2) Representative with customers
3) Enterprise with customers
4) Customers with customers, sponsored by the Enterprise
(“to” implies a one-way information flow, “with” implies a conversation)
However, to round out the internal/external way of looking at things, we might want to think about the “external” interactions through the more traditional viewpoints of sales, marketing, and service. Some examples:
Potential Marketing blogs, in addtion to “branding”
– Product direction
– Uses of existing products
– Case studies of existing customers
– Calendar of events
Potential Sales blogs
– 1:1 blogs between representatives and customers/prospects
(question: would you be more likely to interact with a sales rep if he/she had a blog?)
Potential Service (or Support) blogs
– User groups (discussions among users)
– Problem resolution
– Publication of new features / updates
Any others anyone can think of?
From the “timely!” department…as this post was being put together, also saw that there is a new set of thoughts on Creating Customer Evangelists that may merit a deeper look.
(from Fredrik Wackå, via Ross); and,
(from Church of the Customer, via Nova)