Anil has a Virtual Visit to Lunch 2.0
As you know from my previous posts, Anil is a blogger in the Data Storage Industry, which is the market that Hitachi Data Systems is leading.
Anil wasn’t able to attend Lunch 2.0 due to his schedule (Although I think some of our competitors showed up), however he’s sported the shirt I gave him from his visit last week. He’s even sported our Hitachi Poster (click to see hi res) and took pictures of himself. I think this is the output of how blogger people relations can pay off.
We still may not agree (read his thoughts) on the whole topic of ‘pitching to bloggers’ (which is what the opposite of what I think should be done)
Also, people seem so surprised at web conferences when I tell them what I do. Yes, Hitachi Data Systems has a social media program called “Community Marketing” we have executive blogs, forums, photos, wikis, and some other stuff we’re working on.
Anil, thank you, I’m so glad that you recoginize our efforts to treat every individual as important, every voice counts and we’re really listening. Yup, big companies can think and act small.
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My question though is if a large “storage” company can really benefit from this marketing strategy and line of thinking.
Is it working? Do you have any hard numbers to back up corporate blogging for a storage company? The storage audience is not very “blog aware” or they just don’t care. Of course some of us do and appreciate the corporate blogging, but are there enough to make it worth it?
Great question. I can speak on behalf of my CTO (A blogger) and sales force that says it’s working.
When calculating ROI for business blogging, the value of R is very high, and the value for I is very low.
Not sure why you suggest thestorage audience is not blog aware, see this list:
http://storagebloggers.pbwiki.com/Data%20Storage%20Bloggers
I (and others) try to keep it updated, but everytime we hunt around we find more and more data storage blogs.
Part 2: Anil told me his impression of HDS had a positive change because of our executive and corporate blogging efforts.
That in itself, is worth it.
I’ve other reasons why it’s been a success, maybe I’ll save it for another post.
Actually Josh’s point came up in our lunch discussion. I am also planning to write about it, but will take a slightly different angle than you.
Even though my blog is not a corporate blog, if my blog visitor demographic is any indication, “storage” people, both buyers and sellers, are visiting these blogs, but may be using different routes to find them!
Josh, what parameters, in your opinion, should be used to analyze the effectiveness of storage blogs?
I don’t argue that the storage audience is growing, there are more and more storage bloggers and more and more folks reading blogs (who are not bloggers themselves). I end up with a fair amount of traffic from SAN and iSCSI searches as well. But the number of storage people who read the blogs vs. get their information from other methods still seems to lean towards the other methods category. Have you found this to be different?
I don’t think the only way to measure storage blogging or corporate blogging in general is by sales numbers. You certainly have to take into account Brand, technical support, customer service, loyalty, as well as sales. So there are a lot of ways to justify the effectiveness but in the end, most customers don’t make impulse storage buys or buy storage without a rigorous evaluation. So that was more along my point….Are the consumers (buyers/users) of storage products making different decisions because of blogging (obviously nothing we can solve today)? Are there enough storage blog readers that the brand (or technical support, customer service, loyalty, etc) is improved by blogging today? What is everyone else seeing?
I personally think there is value in corporate blogging and think the storage industry is slowly moving to an audience that can accept it. But I question how much value it currently adds vs. will add in a few years.
Josh
I’ve had this conversations many many times, and I don’t have a conclusive answer. I have a contact that is in fact doing some research to see if blogs (and other social media) tools do in fact help to make purchase decisions for long carefully planned IT buys.
I do know that the buying process involves the following basic steps
1) Pain
2) Awareness of offerings
3) Research
4) Talking with peers
5) Talking with vendors
6) Several things happen after this.
Social Media (voice of individuals in a community setting) can help with 2, 3, 4. And may impact all the other areas in a minor regard.
Part of the job of Marketing is to understand pain (1) we do this by READING blogs (like Anil’s and others). Points 2-4 can be accomplished with social media (and the other points you suggested) .
One of the best presentations I saw yesterday at the “Future of Web Apps Conference” was the “Communities of Passion” by the founder of dogster.com. Without a doubt there is a passionate community within the data storage industry, and I intended to be part of it.
I’ll end with this link from Robert Scoble, he had a massive battle about “Blog ROI” with the CTO of Amazon.
http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/03/31/hi-jeremiah-a-hitachi-human/
I’d love to see what your contact comes up with if that is possible. It’s great to see some real thought being put into the potential impact here.
I’ve seen lots of back and forth about business blogging….I personally agree that business blogging is effective. In the end it comes down to audience though, is the audience that is being targeted people who are likely to be influenced by blogging? Like I said before, I think the storage industry is changing from last years answer to that question of “not really” to next years answer of definitely.
So I was asking if HDS is seeing a current advantage because of the blogging and how that was being measured.