Is Your Brand A Dialogue?
Recently I was searching through online archives of blogging-related events,
and I came across
target=_blank>a post at the Global PR Blog Week 1.0 website. Written just
more than a year ago, the post offers interesting insight into a relatively
early response to burgeoning business blogging phenomenon.
The gist of the post is that blogging just might usurp traditional branding
techniques, i.e. controlling your brand message and its distribution channels
with an iron fist. From the vantage of hindsight, I’d have to say that business
blogging is well on its way to that end.
That’s a good thing.
Sure there are companies that might still consider their brand the
nonmalleable, “company’s most valuable asset” that it had been for decades.
They’ll continue to balk at doing anything perceived as encouraging potential
threats to the brand’s integrity. (If you need a big hint, those potential
threats are anything from letting unhappy customers publicly voice their
grievances to acknowledging that a competitors product or service might to a
better job than theirs—in short, banning anything that helps you as a consumer).
But companies with that mindset will die out like those unfortunate behemoths
at the end of the
target=_blank>Cretaceous period.
Besides, you’re not one of those companies. You operate in today’s business
environment. And, hopefully, you understand the value of allowing your company’s
brand to be molded through dialog with your customers, competitors, investors,
employees, and the general market as a whole.
The light bulb for McDonald’s Chief Marketing Officer, Larry Light, suddenly
illuminated over a year ago. He called the shift in his company’s thinking,
target=_blank>“Brand Journalism”. I simply call it good for business.
Tags: blog, blogs, brand, brand-journalism, Branding, business-blogging, Larry-Light, McDonalds