Breaking down the benefits - Blogging for Retailers annotations, part 3

PLEASE NOTE: This blogpost is part 3 of 6 the Blogging for Retailers White Paper annotations. Be sure to download “Blogging for Retailers - Why Blogging Matters and How to get Started” (complimentary) to follow along.

Blogs Provide Market Research

[Excerpt] A well-nurtured community of blog readers is like an ongoing focus group ready to help your purchasing and inventory decisions hit a higher success rate. Once you’ve established a group of passionate, taste-setting readers, you can readily conduct straw-poll opinion polls to gauge the chances of success with new products and receive unfiltered feedback on your products and services.

DVD-by-Mail example

• Boris Mann’s “Zip.ca incident” and follow-up post, “Zip.ca Presiden, Rick Anderson Responds to Complaints”
  

Rick Anderson, president of Zip.ca, just posted to the ongoing comment thread on Zip.ca. I posted the last time Zip found my comments, back in October 2004. The original post (a link, mentioned because my friend Dave was trying the service) was from February. Almost one year later, the current statistics are: 2355 page views on the original post, and 64 comments.

Reading List

• The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual (available in print or ebook)
  By Levine, Locke, Searls and Weinberger © 1999, 2001
• Unleashing the Ideavirus (available in print or ebook)
  By Seth Godin © 2001 Seth Godin’s Blog
• See also: Marketing in the post-Cluetrain era
  By Tara Hunt, Horse Pig Cow blog - Citizen Agency
  
  photo of Tara Hunt by Dave Olson at Gnomedex 2006
  

Jewelry blog example

• Ice.com company blog - company website
  Just Ask Leslie blog - Finding the Right Ring Size post
  

Blogs Get the Message Out

[Excerpt] Blogs are:

• Inexpensive communication
• Easy to set-up and maintain
• Instantaneous & timeshifted
• A conversation stimulant
• Indexable by search spiders

Social bookmarks

• Social linking icon bar example from Miss 604, a Canuck life blog
  
  

Blogs Help People Buy More

[Excerpt] Along with the benefits of of better understanding your market and enhancing your brand, blogs can actually help you close more business. The key ingredients in this mix include:

1) your site’s increased “attractiveness,” grown by the search engine tuning and relevant content and links from other bloggers;
2) the knowledge you’ve gathered about your customers’ likes/dislikes and interests; and
3) the intelligence and trust built up about purchasing advice.

Knitting Community example

• This Entry Is A Week Late - Presentation notes from “Blogging your Passion” at Moose Camp / Northern Voice, 2006 Posted by Mandy at Yarnageddon blog, Feb. 18, 2006 - See also: The Knit-Blog Community: Stories and Opinions Needed
  

Fashion Retailer blog example

• Couture Candy’s Celebrity Style blog
  

• Couture Candy’s Style Cast podcast
  
  

Continue on tomorrow with part 4, … Critical Success Factors (briefly, … be interesting, be authentic, set standards, embrace community, and get started already)

PLEASE NOTE: This blogpost is part 3 of 6 the Blogging for Retailers White Paper annotations. Be sure to download “Blogging for Retailers - Why Blogging Matters and How to get Started” (complimentary) to follow along.