Create a Blog to Promote your Live Event

Every once in a while, you gotta smile when you see a company executing well on a new idea. 

Such was my experience running across the What's Next blog authored by the talented Jeff Foley of Nuance.   Jeff and the marketing team there are creating buzz around their annual user conference "Conversations," and rather than just post the expected session/track information and logistics, Nuance has infused the conference promotion with a real sense of personality.

Corporate blogs are an opportunity for your company to present a new, engaging voice to customers,  one that encourages them to engage with you on an interpersonal level.  If you look at the majority of company web sites today, you won't see attributed content -- it's been mostly sterilized of personality, filtered through multiple rounds of approvals and blessed by legal.  The blog format, however, gives you an opportunity to be more whimsical, casual and engaging.   

One of my favorite lines from the Nuance blog:

"Automated systems, voice-enabled or not, are often measured strictly on their deflection rate, and therefore, by the money they save.  Why?  Probably because it's the easiest metric to measure.  It's like the story of the gentleman who lost his keys in a dark alley, but started looking for them under the corner street light.  Why?  Because the light was better."

(by the way, here's a secret: Move your mouse over the links for a moment and you'll see his meta-comments on those links revealed)

Want to know more about the benefits of corporate blogging?  Listen to this interview with Debbie Weil, author of The Corporate Blogging Book.

And here are some other good companies with corporate blogs worth checking out:

Sybase
VMWare
Ping Identity
LogLogic
Bulldog Solutions