Put Your Customers To Work

Modern Marketing believes that consumer generated content or Citizen's Media is the killer app of broadband.

At Collaborate Marketing we are very familiar with the challenge of generating sufficient quality content to keep a commercial site fresh, and of use to visitors and customers, within a given budget.

One emerging strategy is to hand over responsibility for the production of content to the company's customers themselves. This can sound like madness to a company that has spent years operating within the broadcast model, rigidly managing information sent to their customers.

However, by providing publishing tools to customers, within a guiding framwork, a limitless amount of relevant, lively and intelligent content can be created at a low-cost. This can form the basis of a community that is useful to the company in many ways including research, feedback, product testing and promotion.

A new website called blogexplosion is a great way to view the incredible breadth and depth of micro-publishing that is being undertaken by people all round the world, from soldiers in Iraq to mums in Canada to IT professionals in Australia.

And note to corporate marketing departments everywhere : these people are not paid. Any company helping, collaborating and communicating with them will be greatly rewarded by positive word of mouth, good brand feeling, increased sales and customer retention.

Comments

[Stephen Newton]

In the end, aren't you merely saying that more businesses should have their own blogs? People will need a reason to coalesce at the blog of their favourite supermarket, say, and you don’t provide any ideas for how and why this might happen.

The growth of blogging coincides with the growth of the internet, which broadband is helping. But it is not a killer app for broadband as dial-up customers can blog just as easily. (Most posts consist only of text. Even if you're uploading larger files, like pictures, the file sizes should remain small unless you really don't know what you're doing.)