BeConnected

Another Example of Why Blogging Experience Matters

If you are meetings and the word “blog” comes up and someone says that your company ought to do one “because everyone is doing it” be very careful. If you make missteps your efforts might go viral but in a bad way. That's exactly what is happening to Wrigley's Juicy Fruit blog. It's not really a blog but just a dated text window that some marketer slapped blog on because it sounded cool for the kids.

So what's the big deal?

Well this so called blog elicited this post from the Boing Boing blog:

Juicyfruit gum has a blog and boy does it suck
How bad does Juicyfruit's blog suck? Let's count the ways.
1. You can't enter the blog directly. You must enter through the main page.
2. You have to wait a long time for the main screen to load up its Flash garbage.
3. You have to wait another eternity for the “blog” to load.
4. The text window for the blog content is the size of a postage stamp.
5. There's only one entry in the text window.
6. The navigation is as confusing as the zero-G toilet in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
7. The actual content is as bland as a piece of Juicyfruit with the flavor chewed out.

“So What? It's just one blog.” you say. That's true but that one blog has about 290,000 visits a day and perhaps four times that in RSS subscribers. Everyone in the blogosphere reads Boing Boing. Talk about bad PR! This is bad PR on steroids.

So if you are about to start a corporate blog for the B2C or B2B market you need to consider hiring an experienced consultant. Someone with a lot of blogging experience who can accelerate your learning curve and even help you navigate through a PR crisis like Juciy Fruit's or UPS mentioned previously. Our blogging team at BeTuitive can help you out.

Boing Boing post

Juciy Fruit “blog”

Technorati Tags: BeTuitive | blog | BoingBoing | customer | marketing | outsourcing | PR | PR Crisis | Product Blogs | Juicy Fruit | syndication | viral

Weekend Travel Report

I am happy to report that I had a remarkably smooth time traveling this weekend. The airport check-in kiosks worked great. Flights were on time. Airport transfer worked fine. There's really no story. That's a good thing because we all know how wrong it can go.

We did see a bit of a story. A young couple sitting across the aisle from us were leaving on their honeymoon. The bride requested hot tea which somehow ended up spilled in the groom's lap. I didn't see it happen so I don't know who exactly is responsible. He did head off to the lavatory to check out the burn. he returned a few minutes later with a bag of ice. The honeymoon is maybe not a good time for a scalding burn in one's lap.

Would it be so hard to come up with some sort of spill proof cup for hot liquids on airplanes?

Technorati Tags: airlines | airport | airport | flying | Kiosk | weekend | stories | travel

Consider McDonald's

Consider the customer intuition challenge that McDonald's faces. They deal in the fixed asset world of real estate. They own most of their restaurant locations leasing them to franchisees. Yet within this fixed structure their business is a moving target. They must constantly adapt to changing tastes, perceptions, technologies, cultures, religions, languages, political movements, supply chains, currencies and competition. As if that isn't challenge enough consider the moving target of their customers. Everyday millions of customers die and millions new customers are born. Expectations are born and expectations die.

McDonald's constantly tests new products and technologies to see what works for their customers. All the while they discover what works and what fails in the scrutiny of the public eye.

Love them or hate them you have to admit that McDonald's knows how to develop their customer intuition. They have survived and thrived as long as they have and grown as large as they have by knowing their customers.

When you think about the challenge of knowing and communicating with customers think about McDonald's and the scale of the challenge they face every day.

Maybe I'm just hungry. Time for lunch.