When a giant company like Qualcomm decides to stop selling a product, that’s news. But anytime you change out a product or revamp your business model–Qualcomm realized Eudora, an early-to-the-scene email client, was never going to make it long-term because, though profitable, fewer and fewer people would buy it because they can get other email clients for free–that’s a good time to talk to your audience about your rationale.
If you have hard-core users, as Qualcomm apparently does for Eudora, you can soften the blow by talking in your blog about the research you’re doing to see whether the product can continue to make sense for your business. And you can be careful to talk about good, easy-to-use alternative products or services to replace what you’re about to pull out from under them.
Of course, you might get a few comments along the lines of “What took you so long?” from non-users, but that’s a great opportunity to respond and talk about how you like to be true to your users as long as possible, and how you didn’t want to disappoint them until it just didn’t make economic sense anymore. Wouldn’t you like to do business with a company like that? Get the rest of that story. here.
Your blog video on a phone – 2 predictions
While mobile marketing is gaining share–text messaging with coupons and contests is the biggest moneymaker right now–it’s still a sloppy proposition to go web surfing in most programs. Readability and usability can be painful. But one of the lesser search engines, Ask.com (used to be Ask Jeeves), has at least come out with a new search product they hope will make it easier to find what you want online via your phone.
Clearly, as people continue to get less and less tethered to their desks, new and innovative technologies are going to keep coming along to provide quicker and easier access to the Internet from wherever you are and whatever tool you have available. What that means for your corporate blog is that if you’re building relationships with your prospects and customers by delivering them valuable content, they’ll bookmark you in their phone favorites just as surely as they do on their desktops.
I predict two developments very soon:
1)A way for your phone to give you a bigger viewing area–either portable and foldable, or pullout, and/or virtual, as in projector! Ever seen those virtual laser keyboards that shine a light that depicts a keyboard on a flat surface?
We used to think it was unique to see pictures of people aiming their phones across a room to take a picture. I predict we’ll soon see pictures of people shining their phones on the wall to view online content–and videos. Virtual projection technology’s already here; all they have to do is adapt it to the phone.
2) Now with Google–and many others–in the video business, I predict we’ll soon be putting video into our corporate blogs. Not long ones, you understand, just little snippets. As streaming technology improves, wait times are cut. As resolution improves, so does quality. And now, with the virtual screen, your visitors can even view your blog video big-screen.
So I suggest you don’t rush out to pay someone to convert your current site to microsize yet. Give it another few months and see what happens in these other areas. Products that seamlessly translate the full-size onto the microchip and back out to the mega screen could quickly make the idea of needing to have content viewable on a tiny screen quaint.
Handling touchy issues on your corporate blog
The local Crain’s Cleveland Business sent this out by email as a breaking news item–15,000 Goodyear workers on strike. You know that newspapers love to point out problems and bad news. And you can bet that if you’re a high-profile company like Goodyear, your problem is gonna get covered, big-time.
So what should you do on your corporate blog when tough issues surface? Traditionally, companies have tried to keep potentially negative things under wraps, but in these days of global connectivity and publishing-by-the-masses, that almost can’t be done. And even more importantly, it’s much easier for a coverup to be discovered and come back to bite you.
So just as you rely on your attorneys and your public relations people to help you through a crisis, you use the same discretion and ethics when you write about it in your corporate blog–always remembering that honesty tempered with consideration for all sides of the story is the best policy.
