Community Blogs - Ultimate Marketing Tool

Community blogs allow your members and supporters to share their successes and their stories. This can be extremely important in maintaining morale and commitment. People want to share their experiences. Many of them may already blog - now you can offer them the opportunity to blog within a community that means something to them.

Community blogs create a greater sense of belonging and promote team spirit. Not only that they are an excellent way for people within the organisation to find out what is happening elsewhere - from the people just like them rather than official, sanitzed newsletters.

Imagine how many more people will become aware of your organization if your members and supporters had their own blogs. Most of them are highly likely to tell their friends and family about their blog. Many of those people will actually subscribe to the RSS feed (a way to automatically update people when a post is made - in other words the news is pushed to them rather than them having to remember to come back and look).

And some friends and family may even tell others about the blog.

This is basic viral marketing (some viruses are good to catch) and it can promote your message in a way that other (expensive) methods can never match. Why - because this is coming from real people that the receiver of the message is likely to trust and be interested in.

Now for some basic math.

Let's say that each of your members has 20 friends (but I am sure that they are much more social than that) and you have 1,000 members with blogs. That means that around 20,000 people will receive information about your organisation.

And many of those 20,000 will pass the message on - and may even want to get involved. So your community blogs become a recruitment mechanism for volunteers, members and supporters.

Google loves blogs. They rank highly and quickly. If you have your members, supporters and volunteers blogging, your organisation will benefit greatly as people link to the blogs, engage in discussions, mention them in forums, place them on their facebook profiles, twitter about them ... and on and on.

The internet multiplies what you do - and it particularly multiplies blogs.

Think of bacteria multiplying in a petri dish - that's how word about your organization will spread across the internet.

Brands are important for every organization, not just businesses. The problem for many brands is that they are manufactured and people can now see through this.

The brand image that many organizations want to reinforce is that they are 'connected' and human. No amount of corporate-style brochures or posters could ever compete with an army of blogs created by real people working at the grass roots level.

Too many organizations confuse branding with advertising and logos. Branding is what is inside the heads of the people that you deal with - in a business, the customers. For charities, donors, members and recipients. And what is in the head will always be most strongly influenced by real people. (Think of how you would react to being treated badly by someone in a telephone call center - the glossy advertisements easily lose their sheen in the face of personal experience.)

So think of your Community Blogs as the ultimate tool for building and growing your brand.

I would strongly recommend that you use the WP.MU platform to build your community blogging platform. Use the link above to access information.

It is built on the WordPress Multi User platform. So straightaway you know it is going to be easy to use as WordPress is THE blogging platform. Many of your potential bloggers are probably already familiar with it.

There is a cost involved but this is around a couple of hundred dollars. Given the benefits above AND the ability to actually make money through the blogs, the cost is negligible.

WP.MU is a one-stop, out of the box solution for community blogging. The installation is carried out by WP.MU and includes over 60 plugins that they have developed for community blogging. These include:

messaging
forums
internal communities
support system
customized themes

There is also a complete set of white-label videos that you can brand to provide guidance to your new blogging community. The experience of WP.MU over many years really shows through - they know the likely problems and they have developed the solutions.

Their support is excellent and there is an active online community.