BLOGthenticity

Instead of getting academic about the use of blogs in marketing, I figure it would be good to just dive into it with the stuff I’m doing, as an example.

I am responsible for marketing and sales of a consumer multimedia product, Nokia Lifeblog. We just didn’t have the budget to do traditional advertising or a big splash. Also, since our product was a blogging tool, it was imperative that we use blogs as part of our marketing mix.

The first problem was language. We were building a website in 8 languages and realized that if we added a blog to one of them, it kinda was necessary to translate it into the other languages. Not only would that slow down the updates, but it would be a true nightmare in version control. So the decision was to just have a blog in English apart from our various language sites.

With the language issue solved, we ended up with a technology issue. Our servers just weren’t set up to run a blogging server, so it would have been updated manually (!). That was absolutely out of the question, since the biggest technical benefit of blogs is that they bring easy content management to the masses. Doing it manually was like building web pages manually – plain dumb. That meant that we should have it hosted somewhere, and TypePad, our collaborator, would be the best choice.

So, it was clear that the best way for us to have a blog was to host it on TypePad and write it in English. One drawback was that we could not use the Nokia.com domain on the site. Ok, but we didn’t explore that much further.

Next we faced the questions that all publishers face – look, tone, subject matter, and, of course, writer. Being a one-man marketing department didn’t make things easier. We played with some looks, but settled for the basic TypePad templates. We knew in the end that I was going to have to write - as with my Blogthenticity colleague Ben, I had not takers to help write for our product blog.

Then, I panicked – I wasn’t confident that I could pull off the tone and subject matter in an authentic way that didn’t bring everyone crashing down on me for being a pushy jerk of a sleazy salesman and then have some sort of negative impact on our brand. Not a good way to get folks to support blogging as a marketing tool back at Nokia.

So the whole thing languished for a few months.

Quietly on my own personal site, I started a separate blog just for me to talk about Lifeblog. I was very clear that it was my blog, but that I also worked for the Lifeblog team and, indeed, I was the head of marketing and sales so the reader should expect a bias.

I slowly and solidly began to build my tone and focus – familiar and honest and open, focusing on Lifeblog happening and not on pushing product.

Traffic has been consistently rising. The blog is being identified as a place to get the scoop on Lifeblog and Lifeblog related issues. And I was able to use it flexibly to do things that the website couldn’t do rapidly – distribute documents, post links to new article, highlight the joys of hacking Lifeblog, and make announcements that were not really official.

In a subsequent post here, I’ll talk more about where thing have or could have gone wrong.

Until then.

Filed under: Business Blogging, Charlie, General