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Blog as a superb marketing tool for meeting planners
by Dr Seamus Phan I started as a corporate and then professional speaker on Internet, security and marketing over 18 years ago, while I started technology consulting for corporations more than 14 years ago. Through the years, I have experienced and used many marketing and knowledge management paradigms, but a large part of many of these “trends” turned out to be fads, and have gone away. So would the current trend of blogs (or weblogs) turn out to be a dud, or can it benefit meeting planners and other corporations alike? Before you dismiss blogs as an awful horn for dispensing expletives and emotion for angry youths, think again. Many large and small corporations, and enlightened marketers, have turned to blogs and associated technologies to elegantly and simply publish information to customers. What are blogs? A blogging platform is nothing more than a simple page editing tool akin to writing email in a web browser for those familiar with the likes of Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. Common public blogging platforms usually allow a user to type in a headline, perhaps an abstract, and then the entire body of the message, and then simply click “Publish” to complete that article to be published on the blog. The article would then appear on top, date stamped, with the headline and possibly the abstract. If a reader visits the blog, he would normally see the headlines and abstracts. He may elect to click through certain headlines to read the entire blog article that follows. One of the most common blogging platform is Blogger (www.blogger.com), which has been acquired by Google sometime back. Blogger prides itself as one of the simplest blogging platforms, with a 3-step setup from (1) creating an account, (2) naming the blog, and (3) choosing a graphical template. Thereafter, you can simply add your news and articles. What is RSS? An associated technology with blogs is RSS (really simple syndication), which is basically a form of news feeds that is based on open standards such as XML (eXtensible Markup Language). RSS news feeds can be read in modern web browsers, or through specialized RSS readers such as Amphetadesk (www.disobey.com/amphetadesk/). Without going into the technicalities, suffice to say that RSS is basically similar to a web page with headlines and abstracts. RSS news feeds can be submitted to RSS search directories, so that readers who might want to read particular news, can simply subscribe to your RSS news feed, and be automatically updated whenever there are changes. The advantage of RSS is that your readers do not have to manually visit your web site all the time to find out if there are updates, but rather, they will receive updates automatically. So with the simplicity for both readers and publishers alike, how can meeting planners and convention organizers tap on this technology platform to reach out to their customers and represented speakers alike? Set up your own platform While public blogging platforms can be very useful in learning how to blog, such platforms are not the best platforms if you intend your blog to be completely controllable and accountable. At the same time, having your own hosted blog means that you can tweak its setup to be more searchable by search engines, and can even tweak its security to ensure that you keep out certain undesirable parties. Setting up your own blogging platform is NOT the same as simply signing up for a public blogging platform. It is very much more involved at the setup stage, although the final result for end-users will be as simple to use as any other public blogging platform. And because most in-house IT administrators and managers are not trained to be writing server scripts and applications, do not expect your in-house IT team to write such blogging platform tools from scratch for you. Therefore, it is wise to engage expert application developers from outside, especially those familiar with your specific industry needs. All too often, programming projects fail because clients expect developers to write applications that fit their industry and user needs, and end up with applications that are difficult to learn and use. At the same time, clients may expect developers to charge low fees, and thereby short-circuiting development cycles and reduce debugging efforts, which will lead to lower quality software with bugs and problems. In short, try NOT to bargain with your software developer! A decent blogging platform, with an easy-to-use web browser editing environment for your employees, with automated RSS news feed publishing, where the blog application runs off a standard UNIX server, can be developed in under two weeks. If you intend your blogging platform to include the ability for users to publish pictures, include attachments, styled text, and other more esoteric features, expect to pay a lot more, and wait for longer time before implementation. How to use your blog and RSS? Meeting planners and convention organizers can use the blogs as a platform to inform of upcoming events, with links to downloadable program and schedule files (such as PDF), and even include short podcasts from featured speakers (as lower quality MP3 or WMA files), as well as images of featured speakers. All these can easily be done without any knowledge of web authoring using HTML (hypertext markup language). At the same time, since blogging platform tools will automatically generate RSS feeds, meeting planners and convention organizers can invite guests and attendees to subscribe to the RSS feed, and customers will then automatically receive the current updates and changes to events, without the need to always visiting the meeting planner’s website. Since RSS feeds require a different treatment from standard web content, it is best to get advice from experts to learn how best to promote the use of your RSS feeds. Pitfalls to avoid While most blogging platforms have no control by the user, if you are a serious adopter to use this to push information to your customers, consider hosting your own. With your own platform, what are some of the pitfalls to avoid and the security steps to take? While technically blogs should allow user comments, it can become very tedious to deal with all kinds of user comments. The problem with user comments is not whether they are positive or negative. Rather, there is increasing comments on blogs known as “comment spam”. Comment spam is basically completely unrelated comments left by spammers to tout their “blue pills”, pornography, gambling, penny stocks, and other usually undesirable content, and can populate your website quickly with junk. Spammers do this hopefully to get search engines to index your web pages with their comment spam, and in turn, create links to their spam sites. Therefore, for commercial blogs and RSS, it is best to DISABLE comments altogether, but allow an email link to each posting, so that users can still contact you directly for comments. If not, dedicate an administrator to scour through contributed comments, and promptly remove undesirable comments. This is also to reduce your legal ramifications in certain geographies where the protection of the law does not extend to the site owner. I still strong recommend against the use of comments though. The simplest direct marketing tool Blogs and RSS as a combination, remains the easiest direct marketing and relationship building tool, with very little barrier to entry. It is also bandwidth friendly, and does not intrude the same manner as mass email, since your customer can choose to read the full article or not, unlike “in your face” mass email. Dr Seamus Phan is a leading author, keynote speaker, trainer and naturopathic philosopher. Seamus is one of Asia’s early Internet pioneers and bloggers. Seamus consults and speaks for international companies, governments and emerging enterprises around the world. He is the bestselling co-author of Dot ZEN \, a business leadership book, and This Body This Life , a holistic health and fitness book. Copyright (c) 1990-2005 Seamus Phan. All rights reserved. END | |||||||||
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