Whether you’re a senior executive at a fortune 500 or just a random blogger at a start up, maintaining a blog is an excellent way to build your brand; and at the same time, participate in conversations about it that are already occurring in the market place today. It’s called conversational marketing and it’s an effective marketing communication tool that can provide an easy way to gauge how your brand is perceived in the public eye. Of course, many corporate and product blogs range from great and informative to truly awful, so keep these factors in mind when managing your own:

Authenticity

Are you sharing your real experiences, or just posting a series of random press releases and white papers? A blog is much more ‘real’ and engaging if you write it yourself. It gives personality to your brand and makes it easier for others to communicate with you. In the blogoshpere, being authentic, open and honest is a necessity; otherwise, it will kill you and you will die a slow death. Just ask Wallmart.

Consistency

Writing in a blog for a week straight and never touching it again is bad practice. A blog is a ongoing conversation between you and your users (customers, general public and even the mainstream media) that should not be neglected. An effective blogger needs to update their blog at least once or twice a week, at the minimum.

Interacting and Listening

An effective conversation is always two-way (well, that’s what my wife tells me). What that means is that when your users speak, you listen and respond. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to implement everyone’s feedback about your product. Think of it as an ongoing focus group between you and your audience.

And the benefits of conversational marketing are…
drum roll please…

Credibility – credibility is huge in the mind of your customers. If you can build up your credibility and create loyal brand ambassadors of your product, you will reap the benefits for years to come.

Traffic – this is really a no-brainer. People flock to where there are conversations happening, especially if it is something they are really passionate about.More importantly, these conversations are starting to appear in search engines which is a significant traffic driver.

Links – good content equals natural links; and natural links equal high search engine rankings. The more quality links you can get to your site, the higher you will rank when someone types in your brand (or product category) name. The last thing you want happening is someone searching for your product name and finding user-generated content that is bashing your brand. This happens all the time. Try searching for Walmart in the search engines and you will find sites like Wal-Mart Watch and Wake Up Walmart. Ugh.

Technorati Tags: social media, conversational marketing, blog marketing, user generated content, ugc