17 juin 2012

Paid Owned Earned Media: 6 plus 6 Reasons to Dismiss or Leverage Owned Blogs #POE

Paid Owned Earned [POE] is the new craze among large companies whose communication, advertising and/or digital marketing are handled by big communication agencies.

Both have now recognized the critical role played by Social Media.

They want to start leveraging the "social" trend and follow those who practice inbound marketing, content marketing, social media marketing or any other flavor or 2.0 marketing.

POE is typically what has come out of their efforts to come back in the game.

This post is not about explaining POE as such.
Neither is it intended to criticize the complexity of what I have seen so far [not much in fact].

No, this post is about convincing my colleagues in Marketing, Communication, Partner Enablement and BizDev to leverage Owned Blogs as part of their POE projects.

Marcom typically gives me 6 reasons for NOT wanting to leverage Owned Blogs as part of POE:
  1. Blogs are "personal" and not "corporate", so it's up to everybody to decide to blog, but NOT to us, "Marketing"!
  2. Blogs are time consuming. As Marketing staff is shrinking further, we can't allocate the time we would need for Blogs.
  3. Subject Matter Experts who can write posts are hard to mobilize, so content will be poor anyway.
  4. We better concentrate on corporate or agency content that can be posted as links on corporate webpages and promoted through twitter, facebook, linkedin or "earned" media.
  5. External bloggers have far more followers and crebility than owned Blogs. We just need to have them write nice posts about us to get traffic to our landing pages!
  6. Blogs are passé. Twitter and Facebook are way cooler!.
To me, none of these objections really stand! Moreover, here are 6 reasons why Owned Blogs should definitely be leveraged for B2B, especially when deploying a POE project: 
  1. Blogs create Content, which is an important part of POE
  2. Content creates Opportunities for Sharing, which is what we do to engage through Twitter, LinkedIn...
  3. Shared Content creates Visibility & Credibility, which helps prospects find our offerings and establishes us as Thought Leaders
  4. Visible and Credible Content creates Opportunities for Contacts and for Inbound Qualified Leads, which is what we typically look for.
  5. Blogs & Events fit perfectly together and reinforce each other. Events create content for Blogs, Blogs create traffic for events.   
  6. Subject Matter Experts abound and most of them do have content available, as long as we aknowledge that content has multiple flavors: original PoV or course, but also recycled presentations [posted on Slideshare, of course], curated articles, news, agenda, etc...
I can testify to the Power of Blogs in a B2B Environment [SaaS & Cloud Ecosystem]
My own experience as Leader of Club Alliances and Club Cloud des Partenaires has shown me the power of incorporating Blogs at the heart of what we used to call a 2.0 Marketing Infrastructure.
I embed a deck of slides and would be happy to share my experience with you!
2012.06.17 - Owned Blogs - Club Cloud des Partenaires - Loic Simon
View more PowerPoint from Club Cloud des Partenaires 

Loic Simon
Business Development - Partenaires Cloud
www.clubcloud.blogspot.com
loic_simon@fr.ibm.com 
+33 6 76 75 40 71