Introduction
While a handful of catalogers have blogs today, many more will begin blogging over the coming months. In this column, we’ll discuss why you should take advantage of this new communication channel and offer some basic tips to keep in mind as you grow and improve your blog.

Why Blog?
Blogs offers marketers several advantages:

• Blogs provide a personal voice for your brand: As the marketplace becomes more crowded, a personal voice that cuts through the clutter is essential. Executed thoughtfully, blogs create meaningful conversations with both current and future customers.
• Blogs provide relevant extensions of your core message. Content on your core business site necessarily keeps a tight focus on conversion and your essential selling proposition. And while your blog should always link to your core e-commerce site, it allows you to cover a broader range of brand-relevant topics. It lets you participate in key conversations that occur higher in the conversion funnel. (Read on to see how online jewelry retailer Ice.com uses blogs in this way.)
• Blogs offer low barriers to entry and low costs for maintenance: With numerous blog software packages available, entering the blogosphere is relatively easy. While your corporate website depends on ongoing support from internal IT and design resources, blogs allow–and require–you to be far more nimble.
• Blogs are good for PR. Journalists often mine the blogosphere for new content and leads.
• Blogs can help natural search rankings. Blogs provide “good bait” for natural search spiders.

For the rest of this article, we’ll take a closer look at these advantages and also point out a few things to avoid.

Blogs and your brand
Blogs, and employee blogs, in particular shape the perception of your brand. This small fact is revolutionary, and the best book on this revolution was written way back in 2000. Six years ago, four web writers turned their online idea swaps about web communication into The Cluetrain Manifesto. If you’ve never read this important book, do so. If you haven’t read it recently, reread it. Cluetrain argues that marketplaces are conversations. Historically, people have gathered in marketplaces to swap stories and goods. This perspective got lost during the rise of mass production and mass communication. The web brings it back. Today, successful online marketing depends not only on broadcast and reach but also on word-of-mouth–the high-tech equivalent of the human conversations in a souk, bazaar, or general store porch. Cluetrain was written before the rise of blogs, but the blogosphere embodies the book’s message. In today’s world, your brand shouldn’t talk to your customers, your people should speak with your customers.

• Tip: Read Cluetrain, and reflect on how your firm communicates with your customers.
• Tip: Embrace two-way communication: allow your blog readers to comment on your posts.

Blogs as more than brand punditry
Blogs need not be dry, impersonal, corporate-speak. Interesting people with interesting opinions write interesting blogs, and readers find interesting blogs. The best blogs provide a real sense of their author, and by reflection, of their author’s organization. To see how a blog can shape a company’s public face, check out Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek, Matt Cutts of Google, Robert Scoble of Microsoft, or Bob Parsons of GoDaddy. Whether or not I’ve met these authors face to face, when I read these blogs I feel like I get know these people personally, and that very much personalizes their companies for me. Even when bloggers are not the official voices for their firms, their writing plays a strong role in shaping how the firms are perceived in the marketplace.
• Tip: Let your voice come through your blog.
• Tip: Offer strong opinions and interesting perspectives.
Blogs as public banality
Letting your own voice come through on your business blog does not mean that offhand or stream of consciousness content is appropriate. Perhaps because of the origins of blogs, some find this trap difficult to avoid. “Blog” is an abbreviation for “web log”. Many of early blogs were public diaries, and this genre is still popular today. According to Technorati, the blog search engine, over 100,000 new Webb logs and over 1.5 million posts sprout up each day. Many of these are personal diaries. While of interest to their creator, outsiders often find these personal journals banal. To peruse this banality, visit Technorati and search on the phrase “homework AND pimple”: you’ll be rewarded with hundreds of pages of teen angst. Or visit http://www.fotolog.com/cypher, where you can view a photo of every meal eaten by one blogger since October, 2002. Thanks, but no thanks. If your company is going to blog, make sure your writing reflects your brand. Just because your CEO can share her musings about her breakfast cereal with the entire world, doesn’t mean she necessarily should.
• Tip: Realize blogs can be more than public diaries
• Tip: Determine which individuals publicly associated with your brand are blogging, and how their blogs reflect on your brand
• Tip: Realize that as blogosphere is insanely crowded, you need useful, well-written content to win relevant traffic
Blogs and Reputation Management
Happy customers blog. Angry customers blog louder. Some complaints are warranted. Some complaints aren’t. It is critical to keep on top of what is being said about your brand and your products online. Because journalists in the trades and mainstream press rely heavily on the blogosphere, problems can percolate from private grumblings to the front page with surprising speed. If you learn of legitimate problems when monitoring the blogosphere, admit your mistakes and move to remedy them. If you hear inaccurate complaints, explain your view of the situation. Responding quickly is essential. There are reputation monitoring services available, or you can track your brand name and key product names yourself via RSS searches (Technorati, IceRocket, BlogPulse, Google / Yahoo / MSN News, etc)
• Tip: Monitor your brand reputation online regularly each week.
• Tip: Develop a response plan–who in your firm will respond to inaccurate posts?
Blogs as search engine bait
Search engines love good blogs. Good blogs are chock full of rich fresh content, clean semantic markup, and rich interlinkages. As a result, for many searches blog results rank higher than product detail pages on search engine organic results pages. For competitive SEO terms, excellent blog content can be a powerful tool to increase organic traffic. “Blogging should be part of any online retailer’s SEO arsenal,” notes Stephan Spencer, founder of Netconcepts and blogging expert. Being a participant in the blogosphere opens doors to links that would otherwise be inaccessible: blogroll links, ‘hat tips’ from bloggers crediting you for breaking a news story or making an insightful comment, listings in blog directories and search engines, and greater willingness of bloggers to cover your PR initiatives. Spencer offers results from a NetConcepts client, science toy cataloger Steve Spangler Science, which attributes 13% of their online sales to their blog. Pinny Gniwisch, EVP of marketing at jewelry retailer Ice.com, agrees that blogs can be powerful SEO tools. “We originally started blogging for search engine benefits. Today we have four blogs. We post three times a week, paying outside writers for enticing content.” According to Gniwisch, the most popular Ice.com blog is Sparkle Like The Stars, which tracks jewelry worn by celebrities. The site links back to the Ice.com retail site and has large regular readership. “During the holiday, our blogs drove over $200K in sales,” reports Gniwisch.
• Tip: Link your blog back to your commerce site
• Tip: Make your blogs search engine friendly, using appropriate tags and markup.

(For blog SEO tips, see Spencer’s blog at http://www.stephanspencer.com/.)

Conclusion
Blogs are here, and here to stay. Because blogs are fundamentally a “pull” marketing channel, blogs will suffer fewer of the spam problems of “push” channels like email. While your blog likely won’t make it into the top 100 or even top 1000 list, a blog can help connect with the most important niche of individuals on the web: your current and your prospective customers.

Check out Alan Rimm-Kaufman’s blog at www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog.