It has been suggested that social media has pushed aside, to a certain extent, more traditional forms of marketing outreach such as press releases and corporate blogs. But the recent clash between Southwest Airlines and actor-director Kevin Smith illustrates blogs are necessary when you have a story to tell that goes beyond 140 characters. They also, when the content is compelling enough, can outperform other forms of marketing.
Person of Size
The clash between Smith and Southwest began when Smith was recently asked to leave a flight because of his size. He had originally purchased two tickets to ensure he could fit comfortably, but then took a flight on standby on which there was only one seat available. At that point the pilot asked him to deplane. Smith began retelling the event on Twitter; Southwest, for its part, responded within hours with its own side - and apologies.
Neither side were completely satisfied with the outcome or apparently with the limited venue Twitter could provide as both took to their respective blogs for parting words and additional explanations.
More Content, More Searches
Leaving aside such crisis communication tactics - for that is what it was to Southwest judging by Smith's defenders on Twitter - blogs are still an underutilized tool by companies, according to Social Media SEO. "Blogging about your business, products, and services is one of the most powerful marketing tools that you can control, and directly impact. Each new blog post equals a new page of content.
"And if that content is built around targeted keyword phrases, as most blogging content is, that page becomes an authoritative page in Google that can very easily be found in the top search results by those searching. Or your new blog post can just as easily be shared through platforms like StumbleUpon and Digg."
OkCupid's Success
If the content and blog is compelling enough, it could even outperform other online marketing tactics. That was the experience of dating site OkCupid. To compete against Match.com, PlentyOfFish and eHarmony, it has tried a number of marketing techniques, often with little success, according to the New York Times.
But then the company started its blog - and a post that set out to debunk conventional wisdom about profile pictures brought more than 750,000 visitors to the site and garnered 10,000 new member sign-ups.
Of course not just any content will do. For the post in question, OkCupid catalogued the photos on more than 7,000 user profiles and looked at how many responses those users received from others. "It found, among other things, that it didn’t matter whether people showed their faces, as long as the photos were intriguing enough to start a conversation."
