Sometimes you just have those 'Captain Obvious' moments. Mine was this week at the SOCAP 2010 Conference (#SOCAPac10) in San Francisco. For those not familiar, think of it as the premier gathering of the minds driving customer relations. You can always visit socap.org for more information.
I had the distinct pleasure of sitting in a panel discussion- Blogging for Fun and Profit... moderated by Social Media Today CEO, Robin Fray Carey (@robincarey). Full disclosure, I work for SMT and Robin is my boss. The panel included:
- Margot Heiligman- SAP- (@mheiligman)
- Danny Kennedy- Sungevity (@dannyksfun)
- Elisa Camahort Page- BlogHer (@ElisaC)
- Lauren Uppington- Tea Collection (@luppington)
A cross-section of industries and organizations- all well established in the blogosphere. All of whom leverage aggregation communities and sites to reach key influencers, and thus plant a flag for organizational thought-leadership.
But Let's Take a Step Back for a Moment....
The purpose of this post isn't to sell you on the value of blogging, nor advocate blogging per se. And for that matter, aren't we some years into business blogging? Yes, on that count as you may remember Stephen Baker's 2005 cover story in BusinessWeek (the old BW) on how blogs are set to change your business. They did. Been there, done that.
What was our panel's common thread? An intuitive sense that their customers- and customers in the making- are having a conversation. Because they know they are vying for limited bandwidth- and attention spans. Because they know they have an opportunity to establish the community they want. Because they know they have an opportunity to offer a rational. A rational for why they are the premier solutions provider to their customers' wants and needs, or soon to be wants and needs.
...so as to leave you with....
Irrefutable evidence that blogging is the communication vehicle of the century, that will produce engrossing and voluminous KPI's! I'll defer to the monitoring tool providers on that point. A common theme- repeated more than once at the conference- is that social media (blogging) enables marketing and customer service to collaborate. This means your customers can reach your CMO, CIO etc- and your marketing can better reflect this insight. Or have a darn good reason why it doesn't.
A good example of this symbiotic relationship was authored by none other than Maria Onegva (@themaria) on the Social Customer- Building Customer Loyalty.
So now I will turn this platform over to you. I'd love to hear what you think. Can we violently agree that blogging is good customer relations? How do you build the community that you want?