blogging

A great blog has many things going for it. It helps build a community around the brand, showcases the company’s personality, develops rapport with customers, answers comments and clarifies issues, encourages interaction, shares important company information, gives insider tips, shares industry news and builds trust by talking in a sincere believable ‘voice’. At worst, a blog can be robotic, formal, maintained by one person and spew nothing but hard-sell advertising and ultimately become a complete turn-off. However, possibly worse than a bad blog, is no blog or an inactive blog, as that shows disinterest and misuse of a communication tool.

Blogs can positively impact your bottom line

The advantages of blogging are not necessarily measured in currency terms. Yet blogs can significantly help with communication, goodwill, PR, brand building, search rankings, media attention (and more), thereby eventually contributing to your company’s bottom line, financially and otherwise.
Furthermore, the time needed to set up and maintain a blog is measured in hours, not days or weeks. Blogs can be created virtually free of cost, updated quickly, maintained dynamically, and have the potential to draw in tonnes of traffic. Not a bad time and cost investment. But I already have a Facebook page for community interaction, so why would I need a blog?
Right, and when tomorrow Facebook changes it policies, or our government decides to ban social sites altogether, the community that you have painstakingly developed will vanish faster than you can say Mark Zuckerburg. A blog is your own turf, just like your own website or your physical store for that matter. It is not owned by a third party; no one but you decides how you manage your interaction. Why would you entrust your long term reputation to anyone else?

Shockingly, during the course of research for this article, I could not find a single mainstream example of a Pakistani corporate blog. Small businesses, news media outlets, individual bloggers and a handful of musicians definitely rule this arena. Perhaps after reading this, the bigger, progressive company (is) out there will trail blaze the blogging path, reap its many rewards and show their contemporaries how it is done!