A Business Blog is Part of the New Value-Add Structure You Want to Provide to Your Customers

Jeff Jarvis has a great post up this morning that explains why cable is a dying platform for content distribution. Because of the Web, content is becoming commodified. No company can have a monopoly on great content. The new platforms are those that enable people to share content freely. Like Google and YouTube.

Jarvis argues that the future of media is in enabling people to connect with the information they care about. But even if you’re not in that sector, this still matters to you. Because like John Battelle told us last year all businesses are publishers now if they want to stay competitive.

The questions you should be asking yourself: How can we use emerging platforms to enable our customers to do what they do better? How can we do that without trying to control the outcome of every conversation? How can we reach out to our customers organically by providing a value add that is compelling to them?

Blogging is one way of doing this. Chances are that someone within your organization knows a lot about what your customers care about. Find that person and encourage them to spend company time sharing that information in the spirit of reaching out to your customer base. If you enable them with some critical piece of information, chances are that they’ll stick around to see what else you can offer.

Self-promotionally, I should mention that our conference this September is going to cover this new organic outreach in a big way. I’m especially excited to discuss it with the newcomers at our “Social Media Bootcamp” on Day One of the conference.