How blogging improves a company’s bottom line at Piaras Kelly PR

How blogging improves a company’s bottom line

Published July 13th, 2006 in E-PR

I was recently interviewed for a piece in the irish Independent’s eThursday section, here’s the article. The journalist asked me for a few pointers on how blogging can improve a company’s bottom line. I also got to point out some Irish business bloggers. Here’s my response:

Blogging improves your company’s bottom line in four ways:

Drastically reduces your website costs
Increases your website’s visibility on Google
Acts as an effective networking tool
Can be an efficient way to engage with consumers

Blogging can drastically improve your company’s bottom line because it reduces your website costs. Blogs are easy to maintain and creating new pages is like sending an email in terms of its simplicity. As a result you don’t need to retain the services of a web developer. A blog can also be created at a fraction of the cost of a regular website. A good blog should cost €500 to create and less than €100 to maintain per annum.

A blog can also reduce the needs for a Google Adwords campaign. Because blogging naturally consists of penning commentary for your website on a regular basis, there is a higher chance of people visiting your site through a search engine because of the combination of search terms on your site.

Blogs are an effective networking tool. They can put a personal face on your company, enabling your executives to build a profile without having to attend conferences or other industry events.

Finally blogs can prove to be an effective way of engaging with consumers, whether it is to inform them of new offers or use their feedback to develop new products or services. They allow you to propogate your brand online, thus raising awareness about your product and service and gaining the competive advantage over competitors among an audience which tends to be more affluent than the average consumer.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Blogs, Piaras Kelly

9 Responses to “How blogging improves a company’s bottom line”

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1 fmk Jul 13th, 2006 at 6:15 pm

piaras, having worked in web-dev for quite a while now, i would have to dispute your assertion that blogs drastically reduce website costs. for many companies, the opposite can in fact be true.

begin at the begining. assume the company already has a website. add a blog - wordpress or whatever - and it has to be integrated into the existing site. frankly, there is nothing worse than companies that have a site and a blog with both using entirely different design templates. no doubt many non-geeks can do that, but not too many, in my opinion. i myself have spent too many hours in the past trying to integrate wordpress into sites - i don’t see it as being simple and straight-forward.

moving on, assuming the company is actually concerned about getting their message out there with regular updates to their website, they probably already have some form of even rudimentary content management system for all or part of the site. so it isn’t always true that a geek is required just to put words on the site. so what cost are you actually saving?

then, consider the true costs of blogging. how many hours a week do you spend on this site? between five and ten? charge that fairly, and i think you’re well beyond the €100 pa maintenance costs.

finally, consider what happens when the wrong people say the wrong thing on a site. i’m not advocating that companies should shut up for fear of saying something that will potentially have negative impact on them. but if you are comparing blogging to email, then you are highlighting one of the major problems with it. it can be too informal, too relaxed, too bloody dangerous. so you have to have the right people doing the job in the first place. and - most importantly - you have to have somethingt o say on a regular basis. not all companies can fit that criteria, which only increases the chance of waffle and piffle being posted to fill the “quota”.

i’m pro-blogging and do believe more companies should use it. but i see the costs differently to you.
2 Piaras Jul 14th, 2006 at 8:52 am

We’ll have to agree to disagree on this one.

My feelings on it are this. Name you five favourite websites. One is probably a news site, theother is you email and the other three probably have to do with personal interests or online shopping. Why do you visit these sites? Because there’s always new content.

If you want to get people to visit your site then you have to update it, unless you’re offering a train timetable, etc. There’s no two ways about it in my mind. A recent survey which showed the majority of business websites in Dublin were getting few hits a day would back this up in my mind.

If you don’t want to commit to updatiung a website then fine. You should go with a bog basic brochure site, max you’re paying is 2 grand. But you shouldn’t be conned into paying some CMS soultion that costs 7 grand, which I know a lot of web dev do. Then you’re locked in with them and I personally think you don’t get a good ROI.

When you’re selling hammers, every problem looks like a nail, and I think a lot of web devs sell solutions which aren’t appropriate to the client, but very appropriate to the web dev’s bottom line.

I may spend five hours a week updating this site, but I’m not paying someone €145 an hour to do it. At the end of the day I have to decide how much time i should invest in it and whether that gives me a good ROI. I’ve cut back a lot since I started because of that.

In terms of real costs, I used to spend €100 a year, but I’m on Hosting 365’s free blog hosting plan, so I literally have to reg my domain every year now with them. If I ever started up my own PR consultancy, I could take this site, add in a couple more static pages and hey presto I’d be set.
3 fmk Jul 14th, 2006 at 11:51 am

piaras - i’m not going to try and pretend that there are not a lot - an awful lot - of web-dev companies out there that just see a client as another cash cow to be milked. i’ve swept up after enough of them in my time. but nor would you argue with me if i pointed out that the same was true in an awful lof of other professions, including your own. i’m sure you’ve had to pick up the pieces in the past too. so you have to pick your service provider with great care, whatever they’re selling you.

i do have a major problem with your contention that a blog only costs €100-€600 pa. as you would have if i advised someone they could get all the pr/marketing abilities they needed from a book in waterstones and never have to pay a penny to a professional, and still have great pr/marketing.

i disagree with your figure both as a web-developer and and as guy who knows how many hours a week a blog can suck from you. the cost of those sucked hours *must* be added in if you are going to arrive at a meaningful ROI figure.

let’s cost your five hours. let’s make you cheap, at only €300 a day total cost to your company (i know you’re worth way more). five hours a week - round numbers, that’s about €15k pa. before adding in any technology costs. which *some* might get away with for your contentious €100-€500 a year, but most would not and would need to consider spending €2k-5k, or having an in-house geek.

the other side of your argument i have a problem with is the side that is actually missing. one of the fundamental issues with blogging - an issue identifed before there even was blogging, by the guys who wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto - is that it should not been seen as being a technological solution to a cultural problem. either the company is open, or the company is not open.

most companies, i think it is fair to say, are not open. they seek to control the flow of information, limit it, ration it, restrict it. they fear their competitors knowing too much, they fear their clients actually interacting with one and other. €600 is not going to change a company’s culture. a close-minded company with a blog is still a close-minded company, only now they’re polluting the ether with wasted waffle. if the culture itself behind the company does not change, no amount of technological smoke and mirrors will matter a jot.

blogging is part of a solution. but it is not the solution itself.
4 David Phillips Jul 14th, 2006 at 1:05 pm

This is a good start, but it is not only the bottom line, it is the value of the company too.

I have been looking at is how Internet presence adds to corporate asset (There is a blog lecture at netpr.blogspot.com). Being involved in social media increases the eFootprint of organisations they can react or can interact. Interaction increases eFootprint dramatically and thereby increase the corporate asset. Not just for the Google Juice it creates but for the effect it has on many other aspects of corporate activity.

The impact of the organisation having a social voice affects all its constituents. Internal audiences, investors, vendors and customers are all affected.

The benefits as Microsoft and General Motors have discovered are tremendous. In the case of Microsoft, social media has transformed its reputation and opened markets that were closing beforehand.

It is the bottom line but it is also the asset value of the organisation too.
5 Piaras Jul 14th, 2006 at 2:12 pm

fmk - On the cost note, I’ll agree with you. I’m talking about the financial cost, not the cost of your time, etc.

The openness issue, I’ll agree somewhat as well, but companies should go with a static site that suits their needs. Our current worksite is a mix of contribute and wordpress. The €150 for the contribute licencse is a hell of a lot better than the €7k I was quoted from a couple of different companies for a CMS.
6 Nabeela Khatak Jul 20th, 2006 at 2:45 am

Hi Piaras,

I don’t think that companies are really concerned about how blogging affects their bottom line. Companies incorporate blogs into their over-all public relations and marketing strategy to increase visibility and see it as a way to drive traffic to their main websites rather than replacing their corporate websites entirely.

There was a recent study (conducted by Cymfony and Porter Novelli http://www.btobonline.com/article.cms?articleId=28694) published in BtoB magazine in the US that stated that three-quarters of corporate blog owners (76%) said company Web traffic and “media attention” increased as a result of their blogs.

Since blogging is still a fairly new medium in the corporate world there is no tangible way of measuring ROI and, therefore, its impact on the bottom line. That said, however, there are many ways that blogging positively impacts a company’s over-all brand awareness—in itself a fuzzy PR concept. According to the above mentioned study by Porter Novelli and Cymfony, 42% said at least one specific post on their blog has affected the company or brand, and in most cases has had a positive effect.

Unlike many business initiatives that are based on thorough due-diligence with specific ROI goals, 63% reported starting the company’s blog because they felt a need to participate in the medium rather than to satisfy a specific objective. There is a saying that “when a new technology rolls over you, you’re either part of the steamroller or part of the road” and most companies don’t want to be perceived as part tarmac
7 Tomasz Kozlowski Jul 22nd, 2006 at 1:13 pm

On the costs note again - I agree with Piaras. €500 is absolutely enough to build a good blog. EVEN if you have to customise the template to match the website design. It might be difficult when you do it first time, but since 10th customised blog - it’s just a simple copy-and-paste work. All you need to know is what to copy and where to paste. Any guesses how many hours (not days!) did it take me to customise Piaras’s blog?
8 DavidSanders Jul 23rd, 2006 at 12:22 pm

There appears to be considerable support among bloggers to establish a corporate blog, but resistance among many organisations, particularly in the public sector. I think it will be a long time before we see more companies with a blog than without.