Blogging is a the opportunity for you to engage your customers and to carry on a conversation with them. Blogging Tips had a post recently called “Why Blogging is About Marketing where Andy MacDonald says the following:

If your company does not engage your customers, you’ll not know that there exists the opportunity to make additional profit and satisfy a number of customers. Use a blog for customer feedback and discussion about products and services and you will help to build your brand online.

Which actually helps to support my position that blogging is more than just simply marketing. Blogging, done correctly is where you don’t just focus on your business. You allow and encourage your clients/customers and prospects to engage in a conversation. Rather that conversation be good or bad about your company and/or product.

If a company receives customer feedback and improves its product in response to that feedback, the company will also have improved its brand online. When the customer helps develop the product, customers are more likely to evangelize a product and brand.

Scoble has stated that blogging will change the way we communicate with our customers and/or clients. Again, that is why blogging is more than simply marketing. Blogging gives us the opportunity to provide a way for us, the home business owner, to communicate in a way most “downtown” or industrial park companies will not. Blogging and providing a way for our customers/clients, prospects and even our competitors to comment easily will expose us to both good and bad communications about our business, service, and/or product. However, by opening ourselves up to this possibility, those we are communicating with will appreciate the fact we are willing to do just that. Open ourselves up and open the channels of communication possible with blogging.

More than that, you are creating a name and a name recognition by blogging and participating in this conversation. And you are doing so in a fashion some bigger companies are using big marketing campaigns to do.

Recently the WSJ.com had an article titled, Attention, Bloggers where they stated:

Businesses of all types and sizes are focusing on the power of bloggers as opinion shapers. But harnessing that power is particularly important for small-business owners who don’t have the money to create name recognition with big marketing campaigns.

“Opinion shapers” or “thought leaders” are two phrases kicked around as descriptions of what bloggers can be if they blog and participate in this conversation created in the blogging world. As a blogger yourself, you want to search out these fellow “opinion shapers” or “thought leaders” and connect with them. Just as you want your clients/customers and prospects to participate in the conversations you are generating on your blog. You need to do four things that Kevin O’Keefe and I have discussed on the phone often. And four things Kevin has talked about many times with others, mainly using F.L.E.E. (By the way Kevin, we should visit sometime).

Like Kevin, I also have to give credit to Steve Rubel for the “four pillars of blog marketing success.”

The last one, Empower, giving others, mainly your customers/clients and prospects the opportunity to tell their stories is really what all of those words above are about. And F.L.E.E. sums it up in four simple letters.

This is the essence of blogging and why it’s a different and perhaps a more powerful means of marketing than traditional PR & communications.

Blogging is not for everyone. But, you owe it to yourself and to your customers/clients to take a hard look at it. Blogs are a tremendous way for you to connect with your target market. And they are a tremendous means for you to connect to the “opinion shapers” or “thought leaders” in your niche and/or target market.

We will discuss more about blogging as a communication tool and dig further into F.L.E.E in future post.