Marketing to Educators with Blogs: Why or Why Not?

So you’ve been reading a number of blogs and you’re thinking, "Hey. I can do this. My company can do this. What a great “free” vehicle for spreading information and getting input from our educator audience."

Perhaps. But before you jump into blogging as though it were just another education marketing vehicle, back away from the monitor. Carefully consider these pros and cons.

Why Blogging for Marketing to Educators?

Generally, you blog because you have information you wish to impart that is of a timely or frequent nature. This can serve a variety of marketing purposes for companies selling to schools Here are three "pros" to consider:

1. To Complement Your Digital Newsletter. A blog can run parallel to, or replace, an email newsletter about your company or product(s). According to the e-mail marketing firm WhatCounts, more firms shifted from direct mail to e-mail communications by mid-2007, leading to increased competition for inbox visibility. Other research shows the majority of marketing email specifically requested by recipients doesn't arrive. Having a blog in addition to, or instead of, an email newsletter allows those who want to get your information to get it, whether or not they have a hyper-active spam filter. And, if you add an RSS feed to your blog (RSS, depending on which definition you prefer, either stands for Really Simple Syndication or RDF Site Summary), subscribers to the RSS feed automatically see new blog entries without having to visit your Web site.

2. To Position Your Company as a Thought Leader. A blog can provide a platform to demonstrate thought leadership. If your company or organization has in-house experts who have a desire to publicly lead dialogue on recent developments in their areas of expertise, a blog is a good vehicle for such insight and commentary. Since blogs reflect personal voices well (and many regular blog readers expect a personal tone), it can make almost anyone seem approachable and human – even a CEO.

3. To Enhance Your Products or Services.A blog can notify customers and prospects of new versions, bug fixes, and other very specific improvements and changes to a product or service that might be viewed as spam if sent as a series of individual e-mails. It also, through blog post comments, can provide feedback (solicited or unsolicited) on what customers think about those modifications to a product or service – acting, in effect, as a mini discussion board.

Why Not Blog to Get Your Message to Educators?

As with the Force and duct tape, blogging has both a light side and a dark side. Many blogs are begun on a whim. Over time, many die of neglect as marketers move on to the next bright, shiny object. There are definite downsides to blogging. Here are three 'cons' to be aware of:

1. Time Needed to Update. Blogs are a time sink, and drain time on an ongoing basis. Once you launch a blog, you've made an implied commitment to update it regularly. What "regularly" means is subject to interpretation, depending on the purpose of the blog. But a blog's popularity is directly proportional to the frequency of its updates (as long the blog stays on topic). One or more times a week is ideal for a blog about timely news developments; twice a month is probably the minimum for any other kind of blog that expects decent readership. Because blog entries – owing to the nature of blogging software – are organized in reverse chronological order and have a date stamp, it becomes very obvious if a blog author has become a slacker. Less frequent updates are okay if the blog is a hobby, or a personal Selling To Schools - The Edu-Market E-Magazine journal. But if it's designed to be a marketing piece to draw people to your company, product or service, if it's not updated regularly, people will wonder if you're committed to that form of communication.

2. Staff Resource Commitment. The biggest resource you'll devote to a blog is not cash or equipment – it's staff. Your blog author, or authors, will need time to both come up with topics for blog entries and time to write them. If you allow readers to post comments, you'll need whoever owns the blog in your organization to make sure the comments are on topic and moderate them, at the same time deleting commercial "comment spam" that tries to get readers to visit other Web sites, a plague that afflicts many blogs. This is in addition to any effort required up front to pick the right blog authoring software (free or not), design a blog Web page (or modify an existing template), and identify the ongoing owner of the blog and its authors. The resource issue is the one issue most commonly underestimated by would-be bloggers, because it's a continuing commitment not unlike buying a puppy. Once the thrill of purchase is gone, the scooping goes on.

3. Potential for Controversy. Even if your blog is not about politics or celebrities, well-read blogs have their own voice. Most have comments from readers. Either one of these can create heat as well as light. The kind of heat can include criticism of the blog authors, their posts or off-topic gripes about the company and its products – all in the blog's own comments. A company that wants to appear transparent and open to its customers knows that this is actually part of the power of blogging: customers are free to speak their minds and have the company publicly respond to those thoughts. However, some firms want a blog to be only one-way, outbound marketing, sanitized of any negatives. For the latter type of organization, controversy in a blog is a downside. That type of company probably shouldn't consider a blog.

If you’re still not deterred from blogging, you could do worse than follow my nine-step marketing blog checklist in The Experts’ Guide to the K-12 School Market published by the Software and Information Industry Association (available from the SellingtoSchools.com online store). Oh, and the worst reason to blog? Because everyone else is doing it. If you recall the boom of personal Web pages in the mid 1990s with a cornucopia of hideous private musings suddenly made public (not unlike Facebook and MySpace pages, years later), then abandoned, you'll know exactly what can happen.