Blogging is all about building relationships - with fellow bloggers through linking and commenting, with readers by providing compelling content, and with potential clients, customers, and employers though marketing yourself (and your product if that applies). This post from Guy Kawasaki’s excellent blog reminded me of the importance of expressing your personality and how sometimes the best PR is result of simply being yourself.
Here’s my favorite part:
“You don’t have to seem all grown-up and boring. Every entrepreneur feels vaguely disreputable. Maybe you drive a crappy car. Maybe you never went to prom. There are enough stuffed suits in this world to fill fifteen Wall Street Journals a day. As anyone who watches American Idol will tell you, what this spun-out, over-hyped world is absolutely famished for is a little genuine personality. And, outside of your technology, it’s probably the only thing you have. So stop trying to be like IBM and just be yourself.”
It’s simple advice, but in the effort to seem professional and organized we often forgot that sometimes the PR spin machine sacrifices personality for slickness and a fancy first impression. In the end, however, your clients and customers aren’t doing business with your publicists, they’re doing business with you. Blogging is a hands-on way to build a personal connection with your readers - and it’s really, really easy once you get in the blogging groove.
Besides the all-important relationship with your readers, blogging lets you reach out to other bloggers in the same industry or niche. Commenting on other blogs - don’t forget to put your blog’s URL in the appropriate blank - is one to make a name for yourself in the blogosphere. By maintaining a blogroll (a list of your favorite blogs in the sidebar), you can promote other talented bloggers, and they can promote you on their own blogroll. Once you become an established blogger, you also can volunteer to do guest posts and create blogging carnivals relevant to your subject matter (I’ll be discussing both of these strategies in future posts).
Blogging is also immediate and candid - you’ll be able to update your blog as often as you want and share news with clients and customers almost as soon as it happens. Besides, keeping your own blog will give you some “internet street cred” within the blogosphere and social media networks, and that’s increasingly valuable in the Web 2.0 era. However, this isn’t the main reason to start blogging.
The two biggest reasons that blogging is an excellent PR move are:
1. Transparency. Blogging makes you accessible and open, and this fosters trust from your readers. After all, if you’re willing to share the details of your business and your life with them in an unfiltered manner, you’ve probably to be an honest, real person to do business with - and in business as in all things, it’s better to be liked for who and what you really are, than hated (or worse - ignored!) for what you are not.
2. Passion. No one will ever be quite as passionate about your business as you are, especially not a paid-for publicist or PR agency. People respond to passion, so don’t be afraid to let it come through loud and clear in your blog.
