Small businesses trying out promotional blogging

SHANNON GIORGIO, right, and Kelly LaChance Guertin, who co-own Bellani Maternity, use a blog to build a rapport with current and potential customers.  /
SHANNON GIORGIO, right, and Kelly LaChance Guertin, who co-own Bellani Maternity, use a blog to build a rapport with current and potential customers. /

Not long ago, a father who was up late at night with his newborn baby passed the time reading a Web log written by Shannon Giorgio, co-owner of Bellani Maternity, a business that offers products and services to expecting families and parents of babies and toddlers.
The next day, the man visited the business on Bald Hill Road in Warwick.
“He said, ‘It was really nice to read what you guys were writing, and know that I could go in tomorrow and just talk to you,’ ” said Kelly LaChance-Guertin, Giorgio’s partner in the business.
Bellani Maternity is among a vanguard of small and mid-size businesses that have begun blogging as a way to build brand identity and customer loyalty.
Larger companies have used blogs as a marketing tool for several years, but the practice is only recently being adopted by small businesses as the technology becomes cheaper and easier to use and blogging becomes culturally ubiquitous, said Kim Lawrence, marketing director at GLAD WORKS Inc., an advertising agency in Pawtucket.
“Blogging offers them a way to get their customers to talk back about the brand and create a conversation and interactivity with the customer,” Lawrence said.
But while blogging is a great way to engage customers, it also poses a measure of risk to small businesses, opening the door to responses that offend other users or badmouth the business, she said.
Businesses can hedge that risk by customizing their blogs with security features ranging from simple software applications that automatically screen for profanity to delayed message posting to enable the business or a third party managing the blog to read every message before posting it, Lawrence said.
But business bloggers that don’t give users the freedom to openly discuss the pros and cons of their brands, products and services run the risk of alienating tech-savvy audiences who value the interactive nature of online social networks and will stop visiting a blog they perceive as inauthentic, she said.
“If your audience is a younger or more tech-savvy group and they want to see comments posted instantly, but you have someone who is monitoring them, then that’s going to be a turnoff,” she said. “It’s pretty typical where marketers will get excited about [blogging] but upper management will get cold feet, because there is a point where you have to just jump off the cliff and see what happens, and that’s not always easy.”
Business blogs are most effective when the content is educational or entertaining as opposed to strictly promotional. Blogging is ideal for small businesses working in a niche market, Lawrence said.
Giorgio and LaChance-Guertin started blogging soon after opening Bellani Maternity last November to build interest in their store, which also offers prenatal yoga, childbirth classes and pregnancy and new-parent support groups.
Giorgio, who authors the weekly blog, “Behind the Bellani Women,” typically posts dispatches that chronicle her own experiences as a mother and small business owner. Recent posts recommended a favorite children’s musician, alerted readers to a Gerber cereal recall, and told of her family vacation, with photos of her children floating in inner tubes.
LaChance-Guertin said the blog helps her and Giorgio forge personal relationships with their customers – a benefit that outweighs the risk of receiving negative response to a blog entry.
“We were a little concerned about maybe some of the comments that we would get, but I think we’re just very honest with what we say and positive about pretty much everything,” she said. We just kind of took the chance to do it.”
In the future, more small businesses will reach out to their customers not only through blogs but also with other forms of digital communication, such as video podcasting and social networking Web sites that they create and host, Lawrence said.
Large corporations like Coca-Cola have already begun creating entire interactive communities around their brands, and small to mid-size businesses tend to follow about five years behind the industry giants in adopting new technology, she said.
“The whole idea of a Web page as a location online that advertises your brand that customers will come to is sort of becoming outdated,” she said. •

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