Front Office Box

Ever since we started talking about Front Office Box the developers and marketers have been telling me we need to get involved in the world of blogging.  Apparently this is the new way to get your message “out there”.  It doesn’t involve a lot of spend on advertising or PR- which is good. It does involve a lot of time from people like me- which is not so good, there’s no shortage of things which need to be done.

My first reservation was our target customers are busy people.  They spend their days doing things for customers which earn the money, and their evenings managing their business.  They don’t have spare time to spend trawling this blogging world. My second reservation was, even if our targets did somehow stumble across our blog, it wasn’t clear to me why they would take any notice.  We’ve already worked out the profile of our customers and one aspect remains consistent, whichever way we look at it.  These people aren’t influenced by advertising, what they read in the press or by direct mail.  They’re only influenced by their peer group – people they do business with or fellow members of associations and other networking groups.

According to Malcolm Gladwell’s fascinating work in The Tipping Point – http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/ the way to get to these networks is through the Mavens, the people who take a little trouble to understand what’s going and translate it for the people they know.  Maybe blogging is the way to get to these Mavens?

My first foray into the blogging world hasn’t encouraged me a great deal.  From what I’ve seen the single biggest topic, in the blogs I’m looking at, is how to take advantage of the underlying technology to drive traffic to your own blog where you have a lot of advertising.  Blogs seem to be a vehicle for punting adverts at people, not valuable, intelligent content.  The blogging world seems to have a lot of sad people in it – people who seem to get their kicks from being rude to other people.

We’re going to keep trying blogging for a while at least, but I’m really not sure it’s going to be fun.

September 26th, 2007 - Posted in Social Media Marketing  |  Add a Comment