The Sound Of One Giant Hand Blogging
by Joshua Tretakoff | VP, Account Management
Many of our clients focus on new and innovative ways to connect with their loyal customers, as part of the strategies we help craft for them. One surprisingly underused way is the mere peeling back of the inner workings to expose the thought process through running blogs. Movie makers, such as Peter Jackson and Bryan Singer have been doing this for years, making the fans feel like they are part of the process, and building up hype, to boot.
This week, the big retail daddy of them all, jumped in: Wal-Mart now has a Blog for their buyers to express their thoughts on upcoming items, reviews of current items, and more. The Blog, like most effective blogs, is surprisingly frank. RetailWire, for instance, highlighted one of the Blog entries about a buyer regarding Microsoft Vista: “Is it really all that and a bag of chips? My life has not changed dramatically – well, for that matter, it hasn’t changed at all.”
This combination of honesty, insight, and sheer information can have a dramatic effect on the customer’s loyalty. Wal-Mart already faces intense competition, and has been known for more aggressive tactics to combat it; this more comprehensive view is one that, frankly, I wish more clients would embrace: you can never go wrong by being honest with your customers, and the more your customers understand about how hard you work to deliver the great values, the more loyal they will be.
