Blogging strategy

Is Twitter right for you? Should you have a blog? Actually, it's a huge question, but here's the medium sized answer:

While you work, things happen that would be interesting to your clients or customers. Those things prove your skill, provide motivation, provoke curiosity, open your clients' eyes about other things they could ask you to do, or give them hints and tips about how to get more out of what you do.

All you need to do is to notice those things, check they are suitable (match your brand), and publish them.

You want to do that in as efficient a manner as possible. So firstly, use whatever works for you. Using Twitter on your phone might work well, or you can talk direct to your customers using something like Bambuser to create 'live' video straight from your phone. Job done.

Once you're in the rhythm of finding stories and publishing them, and when you're comfortable that it's worth your while, it's time to think about how to maximise that. The same story that you, for instance, tweet, could be written up as a blog entry, a Facebook status update, a press release if it's really news, a YouTube (and many other video websites) video, a podcast, a forum entry, a page on your website, a syndicated article. The principle is: deliver in the media that your users want. And, it's a maximum bang for your buck thing: one story, many many readers = more leverage, more impact, more profit.

So you may need to create a system where you brief someone about your story and they make it happen in all those media (I could be that person for you .. remember I have a background in PR).

That's only the start, because once you're out in social media, people will want to interact. That's a good thing. They are potential customers, this is living and breathing your brand, but of course it needs to be efficient and fit with your way of working but here's the point: the main benefit of social media is not the ability to broadcast, but the ability to listen to and interact directly with your customers. You might want to gather customers' concerns and/or ideas formally to help your business focus on the things that matter to them.

If you're not a small business, if you have a whole bunch of employees doing all sorts of things, it gets bigger and needs to be properly managed: many stories out, many individual customer-employee interactions. Everyone involved needs to be on message.

You can see there's a lot to it. What you do is an individual choice, there's no single solution. If you get in touch, maybe we can work out your best way forward, even if it's just to get you started on Twitter.

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