Blogging as Presencing instead of Marketing
Blogging is a high touch, low cost way of developing contacts and maintaining networks. Does it change the nature of sales? I think so. I think it alters the norm from transactional to relationship based.
As I recently commented to a client in an email:
On a blog, anyone can read what you write: your market moves from who you know (~x,000 people) to who can search for stuff you write about (~2,000,000,000 people). The reason I tell you to blog some of your sales pitches is because you spend a tremendous effort tailoring for individuals or small groups (2-3 people). Say only 1 in a million people on the net are interested in what you do, well that’s 2,000x more than targeting those small groups. You are very well known in the industry but you have virtually no individual presence. The bulk of “progressive collaborative†people started blogging in 2004. You are behind.
I don’t know much about selling but I do know that I much prefer to buy than to be sold to. For that to happen I need to be able to see new and interesting information continually coming from vendors I am interested in. Blogs prove themselves as a very effective, low pressure alternative to pushy selling. You can have quiet presence, not pushy proclaiming. With vendors blogging, customers can develop a quiet interest and come to you when they have developed a like for your personality and they know you from enough sides.
Further, writing a blog post is much cheaper for you than paying someone to update your website. You have direct control of the content. It’s also cheaper for readers: they can subscribe to what you say using RSS and invite others to subscribe to your postings too.
Maybe there’s a shift inherent in “Mass Broadcast ‘94″ to “Mass Collaboration ‘06′ that impacts the nature of Sales Communications. In ‘94, there was no great low-cost means for anyone to sustain conversation. Dialog was almost always expensive, short-lived, to specific people and to a limited audience. To speak to the masses meant huge costs in advertising. And you had to get it right first time.
There’s no question that internet technologies has changed much of that. Blogs for instance make dialogue cheap, ongoing, open to people you’ve never met and to massive numbers.
Sales in ‘94 evolved to the needs of the Mass Broadcast: and with that evolved the need to prepare carefully honed one-off messages. Your dialogue was as long as your encounter. Which might be a radio or TV broadcast, a Google Ad, or the length of time an elevator takes to reach from ground to the 5th floor. If you’re really lucky you get to leave your target with an enduring message. Like a URL or a flyer.
But now, once your audience is plugged in, whether it be through RSS, or email newsletter, you can develop an ongoing message. This is time to develop a story, and to invite into conversation to discover and embrace your customers needs.
- Punchy messages aren’t going away: like a great haircut punchy message are attraction getters.
- Indeed, its a bigger fight: 2bn individual voices rather than 10,000 company ones, so you better make your message concise, coherent and convincing.
Marketeer’s from my MBA schools (Rotman & Melbourne Business School) would likely argue that ongoing dialogue has always been a marketeer’s practices. Maybe. Maybe not. Its too easy to sit in an office where you have more extensive conversations with your own staff than with your customers. Its the nature of any environment. In that separation you develop a characterisation of customers rather than a knowledge of them. Such a hypothesis can be dangerous.
So the Blogosphere is a different kind of environment. Here you can have conversations with strangers. 2bn of them. And it’s ongoing, and relationship-based rather than transactionally-based.
Being a wiki kind of guy I’d discounted blogging. More and more I now appreciate the case for both. Today it really is Wikis AND Blogs not Wikis OR Blogs. And of course that will change as the technology evolves, but let’s make full use of what we have today, and not be stuck in the ’90s.
