Several years ago I wrote a book report newsletter about one of my favorite marketing books, Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith. One of the lasting principles I took away from that book is what he called "getting better reality." Before putting great effort into calling attention to a product or service, spend time honestly evaluating how good the product or service really is. It's human nature to tune in good feedback but selectively tune out the bad. Or, more often the case, people vocalize compliments (and even exaggerate them) while keeping complaints and frustrations to themselves. Few like to be the bearers of bad news. The cumulative effect of wearing rose colored glasses is that the perception of our strengths get overstated while our flaws drastically underestimated.

The closed loop of traditional marketing often leave our blindness unnoticed. Not so with conversational media. Highly regarded bloggers have no reservations speaking their mind when evaluating a product or service. And even if they were predisposed to lob softballs (perhaps due to an advertising relationship), readers who post comments will counterbalance the conversation by calling attention to any kindly overlooked flaws. So if getting an unbiased review of products and services is important (and it should be), conversational media will provide it. Getting better reality is much easier when we hear the unbiased, albeit painful, voices of the crowd.


Related to getting better reality is the opportunity to measure goodwill. How consumers and clients really feel about products and services is critical knowledge for brand building. The blogosphere reveals these undercurrents if you study the conversation. For example, suppose a small eruption occurs in a popular blog about a flaw in a product. As the community adds to the fire, the degree of heat can be gauged. Is the crowd truly enraged or just disappointed? Is their language full of final-straw statements and threats of brand abandonment, or are they hopeful that a solution will be forthcoming? If something bad happens to a company, is the crowd sympathetic to their plight or quietly happy to see them getting their comeuppance? Knowing how much or how deep your goodwill goes is an incredibly valuable bit of marketing information.


Being aware of and engaged in the conversations where your brand is being discussed is in itself a brand-building, confidence-establishing activity. Consumers welcome and reward companies that pay attention and respond to their collective voices. There are few ongoing, real-time opportunities for brands to activity engage their customers. Blogs regularly provide such great opportunities.


Search Engine Optimization - Both having an active blog and participating in the conversations of other bloggers extends other online marketing efforts. Search engine optimization is 10% getting your web pages structured and set up properly, and 90% adding new and relevant content regularly. Blogs provide a relatively informal way of regularly adding pages to a site. Postings don't have to be long. A paragraph or two is often long enough. Additionally, participating (non-anonymously) in blog conversations create external links which both lead to visits and contribute to overall link popularity which can favorably impact search engine results.

Search Engine Marketing - Placing advertising on blogs can be an effective advertising venue. As already alluded to, it can also be disastrous. It all depends on how appropriate the ad is to the blog and the conversation. A mismatch can really hurt, but a good match can create cumulative effects. By being active on industry blogs, discovering and evaluating such opportunities will be much easier. By the way, when it comes to advertising on blogs, blog owners often have the last say on whether or not they'll accept a particular advertiser or advertisement on their site. So in some cases, if there is a mismatch or simply lack of good will, you might not be able to buy onto a blog.

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