Web 2.0 tools such as microblogs, blogs and wikis could support strong interaction between businesses and consumers if implemented appropriately.
Today let’s have a look what blogs can do for the professional service sector.
First I want to make this clear. Although blog can be a powerful communication tool that build brand awareness, nurture engagement and gather opinions, but not every businesses can utilise this tool appropriately to create value. And that’s why many businesses have poorly developed blogs with barely any visitors and even fewer comments.
Initially, corporate blogs are just blogs managed by businesses to share information about their products and services. But for those who have posted beyond boring marketing material and cut/paste media release information, they have taken initiative for the occurrence of bidirectional information exchange on their corporate blogs.
Expectedly, the best corporate blogs are dominated by the IT sector. We will take PlayStation blog as an example.
PlayStation (PS) is a well-known video game console released by Sony date back to 1986.
Since 2007, it also published a corporate blog to successfully engage customers, promote market sales and improve product development.
The PS blog has divided itself into two sections (as the green arrow has indicated on the above image), both strongly supporting customer engagement.
Engage customers while promoting market sales
The “PlayStation.Blog” part contains exciting PS product news, latest game information, gaming industry news and official blog cast to showcase products and services.
By deriving customer comments and encouraging marketing communication, PS has not only engaged customers to participate in the business activities; but also utilised the blog as a marketing tool to promote its sales.
Engage customers while improving product development
The “PS.Blog.Share” section provides a space for users to formally submit their ideas for improving PS products. The submitted ideas will enter a ranking system where other game fans can vote up or down these ideas. The most popular idea up to today has received over 45,000 votes.
These innovative and serious feedbacks have become great treasure for Sony PS, the highly voted ideas represent what the customer truly wants and hence can be really helpful in improving product design and development.
It’s said that blogs are the tools born for consumers and used for businesses. As a result, businesses should really encourage and allows customer to add value to the company with user-produced content and knowledge sharing; just like what PS has done.
Thank you and feel free to comment on my post if you have any opinions/ideas :)
