The traditional business sales formula is quite simple and even pleasant to read:
Good Product + Good Advertising = Good Sales.
Years have gone by and this formula has been transformed by ever changing business forces to a myriad other formulas. It’s now really hard to tell what the universal agreed upon working formula is, thanks to a zillion business books all preaching different ‘guaranteed-to-work’ business practices.
Creating a good product is easy(that’s not really an option anyway), and thanks to your preferred media agency, a good branding strategy is also quite easy to formulate. In the era of TV, radio and Newspapers, good publicity was also easy to get, of course after allocating substantial advertising space dollars in your budget. Now we live in an internet era.
One of the many definitions of the internet is ‘That immeasurable $0 advertising space a.k.a A pain in every Corporate communication officer’s neck’. If only they could do without this damn cyber space. Sadly, they can’t.
How about a real life example?
Dell is one of the leading brands in the world. In 2005, they did not have a blog. But one of their customers did. One day, that customer decided to put a blog post on his blog titled ‘What the #uck is with Dell Technical support!?’ This customer was evidently very upset with Dell’s customer support. Another blogger wrote a related article on his blog as well, but that wasn’t the worst part. This second blogger was so popular that his post led to the creation of a new term for Dell, ‘Dell Hell’.
Suddenly, a search for ‘Dell’ on google would also yield numerous blog results titled ‘Dell Hell’! As a result, Dell got negative press coverage in the New York times and Wall street Journal as well.
Dell didn’t have a blog, so they were unable to respond to the angry blogosphere. At the height of it all, 49% of all blog posts about Dell were negative. Rather than spend hundreds of millions on promotional ad campaigns, Dell decided to set up their own blog. Dell also dispatched technicians to reach out to complaining bloggers and solve their problems, earning pleasantly surprised buzz in return. Negative blog posts have since gone down to around 20% only.
This positive vibe reverberated into traditional media as well. Jeff Jarvis of Business Week wrote “In the age of customers empowered by blogs and social media, Dell has leapt from worst to first”.
Michael Dell is quoted as having said, “A company this size is not going to be about a couple of people coming up with ideas. It’s going to be about millions of people and harnessing the power of those ideas”. This is precisely what blogs and social media are all about. Letting your customers be the unpaid members of your product development and marketing teams.
Dell now serves as a model of effective e-branding, making $5 million in sales by last year purely from its Twitter page. Within 6 months of launching their internet campaign, Dell was receiving 250,000 visitors to their website per week. 25 to 37% of their new customers would not have bought from dell were it not for the internet.
Do you still need convincing on the need for a corporate blog?