Mickey Khan at DM News wrote an excellent editorial piece where he dubbed the social networking revolution the “Age of Expression.”
It’s a good phrase and he asks the same questions of the business world I’ve been asking: why aren’t you truly engaging your customers with interactive media like blogs and social networking?
The technology barriers are gone. The customers are clearly ready (hell, they’re engaging each other without any help). The costs are insignificant. What’s the barrier?
A failure of imagination? Fear? Money??
In the absence of even marketing-savvy companies like Lands’ End and Harley-Davidson – who fiddle on the sidelines – customers (and soon-to-be-customers) are burning up the Internet in MySpace, YouTube and others.
They’re connecting with each other, forming online communities, and sharing their brand/product preferences with everyone in the group.
From business? Crickets. Dead silence.
I can see why a business wouldn’t want to launch an unmoderated blog for every employee in the company, but c’mon – where are the barriers to launching a simple blog? Why sell widgets one at a time when you can connect with customers and sell them widgets for the rest of their lives?
Why not reclaim the online brand from those not in your employ who’d gladly control it for you?
Worse yet, this is a golden opportunity for smaller businesses to wrap up their share of the market from bigger competitors, protecting their most valuable asset (customers).
Why so few takers?
[tags]business blogging, corporate blogging, age of expression, copywriting, marketing, blog, business blog[/tags]
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