PT VMi Technologies

How many times have we seen a company do this? They start blogging, and their initial efforts are less than spectacular. We forget that many of us had the same hiccups when we started our own blogs. It takes time and quite a bit of trial and error to run a successful company blog. By now, many blogs need a checkup.
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A few months ago I wrote an article for MarketingProfs entitled Ten Steps to Starting a Company Blog. Even as I was writing that article, I had in mind to later write a followup article that would cover what happens if a company starts blogging, and they run into problems. There’s no shortage of advice available to companies on how to get started blogging, but not a lot out there to help them after the fact.

I recently was contacted by a company that wanted to improve their blogging efforts. Their blog wasn’t having the desired results. But they were posting almost daily, and several members of the company, from the CEO down, were involved in writing for the blog.

The problem was, the blog wasn’t positioned from the reader’s point of view. It was presented as an “online brochure,” with every post focusing on one of the company’s offerings. There was zero interaction with its readers, and no reason for the readers to interact with the bloggers.

How many times have we seen a company do this? They start blogging, and their initial efforts are less than spectacular. We forget that many of us had the same hiccups when we started our own blogs. It takes time and quite a bit of trial and error to run a successful company blog.

The natural inclination for many companies is to use their new blog as a promotional tool, which is exactly what will turn readers off immediately. And many don’t understand how valuable it can be to receive feedback from readers, or how to encourage that feedback.

And these are some of the reasons why I wanted to write my latest article for MarketingProfs, “Eight Ideas for Revitalizing Your Blog,” which published today. I want to encourage companies to start communicating with their customers via their blogs, but I also want to see that they get solid advice so that they can stick with it if the effort isn’t netting the results they were hoping for. I know I made plenty of mistakes when I started blogging, so why should companies be any different?

What are some of the blogging mistakes that you see companies making, and how can they correct them?

Did you hear that Disney (NYSE: DIS) is doing away with its Disney Magazine just as the company is kicking off its year-and-a-half-long Disneyland birthday party throughout its theme parks? The glossy quarterly read had a reasonable circulation — I’ve read reports claiming that it was as little as 500,000 to as high as a million subscribers. More importantly, unlike the surprisingly unbiased Family Fun publication that Disney will keep producing, this was the ultimate promo pimping machine in the Disney marketing arsenal.

As a colorful look at the company’s new movies, theme park attractions, and retail releases, the magazine was practically given away with dirt-cheap subscriptions. But that shouldn’t have mattered. It was a valuable resource in the homes of families that were Disney’s biggest fans.

I wasn’t pleased when Disney discontinued its Magic Kingdom Club program, which was free for its shareholders and corporations, but I understood the financial basis for morphing that plan into its premium Disney Club offering. Then Disney Club bit the dust when the family entertainment giant realized that there was more monetary pixie dust to be snorted by disbanding Disney Club and funneling its members into Disney-branded credit card plastic.

But what possible explanation can there be to do away with such an effective quarterly promotional tool?

It’s not just Disney that isn’t making much sense these days. Over just the past few months, I have been wondering out loud about some other seemingly boneheaded corporate moves. Consider some of the other shortsighted decisions being made:

• In January, Kodak (NYSE: EK) sold its Aunt Minnie. Okay, technically it’s AuntMinnie.com, a popular site for professional radiologists. Think about this one a bit. While Kodak is trying hard to matter in the growing world of digital photography, the profits that it counted on from its film and photofinishing business just aren’t going to be realized in the digital space. That’s why the company has also been emphasizing its steadier medical imaging business. Don’t you think that owning an edgy and active community site would be vital to the company’s growth in radiology? Of course. Aunt Minnie should never have gone away.
• Back in February, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (NYSE: MSO) closed its online store, save for a few operations like its lucrative floral business. Explain this one to me. Stewart was just weeks away from her prison release. In the fall, she will have not one but two prime-time television shows on NBC. If her visibility is about to skyrocket, shouldn’t the company be enhancing and expanding its online e-commerce possibilities instead of closing things down?
• Also in February, Viacom (NYSE: VIA) announced that its Paramount Parks business was on the block. Viacom is an entertainment company. It needs to market its Paramount movie products as well as its many cable properties, like MTV and Nickelodeon. With its chain of parks generating turnstile traffic of well over 10 million, the last thing the company needs is to lose contact with a crowd that consists of the ideal demographics for its other products. Thankfully, I’ve had someone write to tell me that the company is no longer interested in selling its parks. Finally. Sanity!

Let’s hope it’s contagious.

Some more recent Disney-related headlines:

• Disneyland’s 50th anniversary has the makings of a great year for Disney; you just won’t be reading about it in Disney’s namesake magazine.
• When Disney launched its credit card a couple of years ago, it did seem like a Goofy deal.
• Share your thoughts in our legendary Disney discussion board.

Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz has owned shares of Disney since the 1980s and is at the parks often. The Fool has a disclosure policy. He is also part of the Rule Breakers newsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow’s ultimate growth stocks a day early.

I came back to work last week feeling refreshed after the Christmas break ready for the challenges of the new year. We are less than two weeks into the new year and my supervisor is already driving me crazy.

Over the holiday period, he seems to have spent to whole time expanding his ‘management speak’ vocabulary. Our department now has several things ‘on the radar’. We ‘touch base’ rather than have a weekly departmental meeting and get a ‘heads-up’ on current projects. We are constantly encouranged to ‘think out of the box’ and woe betide anyone who ‘drops the ball’!

The problem with management speak is that it is contagious. As soon as a new phrase is used, it speads like wildfire to all the would be, wannabe management types. Why can’t people just say what they mean for god’s sake?! Why do they have to invent new ways of saying simple things. Is it entirely necessary to ‘reinvent the wheel’ when it comes to communicating with our colleagues?

Managers just use this terminology to confuse people - you can never get straight answers to a plain straightforward question. Is it that they are trying to keep their subordinates in their place by using this obscure language?

I wonder if they have any idea how ridiculous they sound?

Hi

Just call me Frank. I once worked in a company named PT VMi Technologies. I want to share with you my experiences when I worked here. I also want to give you all the information about working and career, so you won’t be misguided.

I hope all my posts can be useful for you. You can contact me at  bloonster at gmail.com.

Warmest Regards,
Frank