Seihaku’s Blogmarketing Bible

Mental guidelines for management’s introduction of corporate blog

Corporate blog can either be a product blog or a brand blog. The fact that corporate introduces blog brings in difficult situations in terms of managemen. Looking at Korean corporate and its characteristics, corporates hide what they want to hide and notifies the press of only the profitable portion, wanting to take control of and predict the system of client communication. Due to this, corporates have limited their client windows to PR or marketing department and have intercepted further information to remain intact.

In such situation, corporate wants to control all aspects of product or brand blogs, demanding prior approval of individual contents. But what’s important is that corporate and blogs must remain independent. When a corporate takes total control of the blog and use it as an advertising or marketing tool, blog is no more than a corporate department. Today, several firms are proceeding blog marketing is such way where the corporate takes care of contents project and blogger works only to touch up its contents which then gets approved finally by the company executives. As of now, such blogs are called, corprate blogs.

From the corporate standpoint, blog is most safe and ideal yet why do they fail and become extinct? This problem can be condensed down to two core points that the contents quality of corporate blogs are low and that is fails to draw customer interest. In order to get approved by the executives, it must satisfy their taste and this usually means the exclusion of customer benefits. This is no different to the conventional home page which works as an advertising instead as an information and no matter how hard they try and apply by developing various topics of interests, it cannot overcome the generation gap that is between the management, who aren’t aware of the Internet trend, therefore deciding on a textbook like material then posts it.

Also, any responsibilities related to contents are attenuated through internal approval which puts a limit on creating genuine contents and even if they continuously post contents in a short term basis, but eventually need to shutdown like a dried up well.

If so, what would be blog marketing guideline that corporate managements can accept? How should approach in order to achieve the effectiveness of blog marketing?

It must be able to portray a recognition that ‘Corporate and blog are independent” and it should remain independent in real life as well. Corporate should restrict blog contents related intervention and keep it minute as possible. Blog marketer should obtain sufficient prior knowledge of corporate product and brand. Corporate should also try to keep a distance when a blogger is promoting various issues or promotions. This allows the corporate and the blogger to be a separate entity which acts as an element in increasion the blogger’s reliability.

In the process of comparing its product to another competing product, a blogger becomes exposed to an attack from the competing firm. In this process, to protect the firm, a blogger should engage in a fight as a lone entity who should make create values and make a decision based on personal identity.

From the corporate standpoint, recognizing the independence of a blog marketer is the core element of establishing the 2nd brand. There is nothing more foolish than to introdue a content approval system. If your blog marketing introduction has failed, it just means that your firm hadn’t recognized the value of a blogger enough.

Provide sufficient information. Give full authority related to blog marketing. Provide full support in contents development. Announce that there’s no connection between the firm and the blog, stress on it on the home page, tell your competitor. Support your blogger’s creativity, acts of outburst and issues.

Blog will repay you many times over your provided costs. Surely.

In the age of Internet, it is much more effective to convey messages through a simple image than to use long, logical explanations. This can be seen in DCinside’s bulletin boards, you can many ideas and visual effects rising as many pictures and articles were posted together. This visual element acts as a great power in moving the crowd of today.

This power of the bulletin board is demonstrated through the explosive sales increase of digital cameras. It can be the critical key point to rule the image in a situation like this. As the general public learned and were exposed to programs and technologies which they could not easily approach, this domain leveled off quite a bit and the control of creators weakened in comparison to the past. All visual technologies and techniques will become more and more leveled as time passes.

In order to rule the image, you will need both processes: ‘creative’ and ‘media’. This is where we can choose blog as a medium. Korean netizen’s point of view on image is world class and the desire for images are substantial. The industry that will grow the most in the digital world would have to be the design industry.

The demise of newspapers should be regarded as the demise of text and logic and the Internet is an undefeatable empire with the influx of multimedia. Then what would be an ideal contents to lure the Korean netizens, who are known for their high taste?

Netizens will show their concern for image over texts, movies over images, so the presentation of contents will be more critical than its substance. Distinction and acquiring prior occupancy will take a critical role in representation that is competitive. Then how should you create distinction? Firstly, to raise the level of perfection to a level above that of images used for advertising. Secondly, to mess it up so much that perfection doesn’t mean anything. And thirdly, do not use a conventional but use a new program.

But the core message that lies underneath should be extremely short and simple. Netizens want something that they can immediately understand the moment they see it. You can’t be a pro unless you can convey the message in that short given period of time.

It is obvious short, simple images are ruling the world of Internet.

One of the fundamental changes that followed the transition of Internet to media is the communication method. Looking at communication through books, the pre-Internet age made it difficult to get a meaning across thus hard to understand; yet today’s Internet age make it straight forward and easy to understand. Indeed, it can be described in just two words: speed and understanding.

This change is due to the habitual process of information acquiring that occurred by the tool used to meet customers, monitor and its limit. The process of click and its response followed by unconscious click that leads to information acquirement, analysis and decision, all in a short amount of time, is bound to provide extreme stressful condition and people are led to act as following in order to protect themselves from stress. They will make a decision based on headlines and the first 2~3 lines from the contents that follows the initial click and makes a unconscious scrap; then forget about it.

In this process, netizens become more simple-minded as the act of saving like a machine repeats instead of modifying, processing and recreating information through deep thinking. The fact that solid contents are preferred over self-created contents has to do closely with the simple-mind becoming process of people using computers. Looking at it step by step, all mankind connecting to Internet through computers will accept information as a habit of using the equipment, unless there is a radical change and this is where the standardization of mankind begins.

In future, creativity will be of more important value to mankind and rest of the values other than creativity will be absorbed by computers or Internet, which can be supported from anyone, anywhere, whenever. Just think about it, if the business can proceed with my idea by investors, engineers, distributors and marketers from all over the world, then the most essential thing would be the creativity necessary in the initial phase of the business. In the end, you can draw a bigger picture only by being able to keep a open, creative mind free from the convenience of computers and Internet.

There’s just one thing that troubled me seriously. If there truly is a conspiracy to take control over the human mind through computers and Internet, it really is a matter of grave concern. The future of mankind will either of the two; those majority of man who will be tamed by computers and Internet, and those minority of man who resist and fights to find an alternative.