blog

Using a blog to market your IT VAR business can be incredibly powerful. You can get in front of your prospects and clients as often as you want, put your thoughts into the market quickly and take the space to explain ideas that just won’t fit on a one-pager. And, you gain access to new leads … which take the trouble to find you (e.g., via Google) and take an interest in your content.

Since this form of marketing is still new, many companies are still feeling their way … and are making plenty of mistakes. If you’re thinking about launching a blog – or have one already – here are five common missteps. Just by knowing them, you’ll be able to enter the blogosphere informed and ready to demonstrate your company’s capabilities.

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If you aren’t thinking about cloud computing yet, it’s time for you to start. Now. Seriously. Sure, there’s been a lot of buzz around this for a while, and IT buyers are starting to buy into cloud computing services (especially in the small and medium-sized business segment). Services are popping up from some of the strongest brands in the IT industry, including EMC’s cloud-optimized storage, VMWare’s vCloud and Cisco’s cloud computing overlay for unified service delivery. But, the most interesting indicator of cloud adoption is that IT departments are hiring for it.

Your clients are so committed to exploring cloud computing that they are adding to their departments – in a tough market. According to a report by InfoWorld, mentions of “cloud computing” in job posts on Indeed.com are up 350,000 percent since January 2008.

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Forrester Research offers a pretty grim assessment of the future of social media marketing on its blog: Though social networks are the “future of online life,” James Kobielus writes, we could reach a point where “social network analysis – automatic, real-time, effective – will become too popular.” Everyone will wind up scouring social networks for business opportunities and crunching the same commodity analytics from platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook. The competitive edge, effectively disappears.

Well, the reality is a bit more complicated than the eventual degradation of social media’s value. As these platforms continue to gain adoption, especially as marketing platforms, look for the following to emerge. Look for three IT market drivers that will come from the ubiquity of social media marketing.

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One of the top concerns we’ve heard about blog-based marketing is scope. Most IT manufacturers and VARs do everything they can to build targeted lists and zero in on exactly the audiences they want. Blogs, it seems, go in exactly the opposite direction, giving you the entire web, even if your needs are limited to a company of a certain size, industry or region. A marketing blog can deliver on this, though it might not seem intuitive. The difference comes in how people use the web and find sites.

The fact that the web is worldwide doesn’t mean that everyone in the world is looking for your company or your blog. In fact, depending on how you write your blog content, the visitors who find it can be rather specific.

There are basically three ways to find a blog (or any website): direct access, online referral and search. The first, direct, means that the visitor either knows about the blog already or has learned about it offline (e.g., by word of mouth) and has decided to take a look. A referral occurs when a visitor hits your blog by clicking a link to it, either from an e-mail message or another website. Finally, there’s search. You top a few words into Google, Yahoo! or another search engine to find information or a particular website.

Let’s take a look at what this means for the people who come to your blog:

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Even with 60 million people riding it, there’s still room on the Twitter bandwagon. While you’ll never care about most of these people or anything they have to say, there is a rich exchange of IT ideas occurring on this service. Check out “virtualization,” “cloud computing,” “data security” and “green IT” to see what I mean. And, most of the OEMs have active Twitter presences, including VMWare, Citrix, Cisco and EMC.

So, Twitter has marketing potential: relevant audience, reach and intelligence/analytics (we can help you with this last one). With a touch of common sense, it’s hard to do anything “wrong.” However, it can take some planning to generate a marketing impact you can measure by ROI. The first step is to understand what Twitter isn’t.

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