Another great conversation I had today was with Gunjan Bhow, who is the VP of Marketing & Product Management for ActionTec. Gunjan was blogging for a while for ActionTec, but he described the initiative as being “deprioritized” within the company.
It’s not that they didn’t see the value in blogging, he said. It’s just that there were other pressing initiatives they had to deal with. This is something we see a great deal within companies. There’s the interest in blogging, but there isn’t a lot of structure in place to support it. Most companies simply aren’t willing to justify the time and effort needed to make blogging a real priority. That’s why we think that sponsored blogs like inFlightHQ and Big Business Jet are such great options. Companies that recognize the value-add can get a blog that reaches out to their target audience without having to invest their own personnel in the venture. That allows them to go back to doing what they want.
But enough with the sales pitch for our sponsored blogging services…
Gunjan shared some of the evolution of ActionTec’s blog with me. At first, the company started out with a primiarly B2B focus. The were working on reaching out to telecommunications companies. They distributed their wireless routers primarily through Verizon. But more recently, their focus has expanded to include direct consumer outreach. The blog was an offshoot of the desire to become more consumer-centered without spending gazillions of dollars on marketing initiatives.
Gunjan struck me as a guy who really gets it. Not only was he tapped into the fact that Wordpress rocks, but he understood that a company blog should not be constant 100% plugging of the company’s products. He was more interested in writing about the digital lifestyle.
He also understood the importance of engaging with other bloggers. Over the past few days, he’s done interviews with mainstream media outlets and many, many bloggers. He talked about the engagement he’s done with the folks over at Skype Journal in conjunction with all the great hardware that Actiontec has manufactured to go with Skype.
He views blogging as a replacement of mainstream media. He talked about the way that media in the United States has become such a “he said, she said” phenomenon. There’s very little direct personal communication between companies and individuals, and blogging is a way to cut through that.
It’s always nice to meet people who really understand blogging and the blogosphere, and Gunjan is one of those people. I really wish he had more time to blog, because I would really enjoy reading what he has to say.
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