Video 16 - Corporate Blogging - What IT Pre-Sales Engineers Really Think About b2b Content Marketing

What IT Pre-Sales Engineers Really Think About b2b Content Marketing.

Video 16 of 18: Corporate Blogging

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An edited transcript of the conversation is provided below.

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Video 16: Edited Transcript

This question is about IT vendors, and I've prefaced it with the phrase, "do IT vendors get corporate blogging?"

Matthew, do you make time to follow any vendor blogs from the networking space, and do you happen to know if any of your prospects or customers rave about certain blogs?
Or is everybody too busy to even think about this?

Mark, I read a lot of IT vendor blogs. There tends to be a decent amount of useful information in them. However, I don't come across too many customers that mention that they read this on a corporate blog.

I think the problem with corporate blogs is that they're so focused on protecting that brand, looking professional, and all that stuff, that they forget how to make the content interesting.

Small Company Versus Big Company Blogs

There are some, and I think it's probably more the smaller vendors, that tend to have a lot more fun on their blogs.
And so it's nice to read, it's interesting to read.

Whereas, some of the larger companies, their blogs are very dry.
I'm not saying there's not usable information in them but it's such a controlled message, that there's almost no sense of emotion whatsoever.
The only sense of emotion you get is this fake enthusiasm where they're just excited about their own product, or their own launch.

But I also think if you're a multibillion corporation like HP or Cisco or EMC, I don't know that you can really play fast and loose with your blogs.

You can do other things at your conferences. EMC has this thing they do at EMC World called, 'Chad's World'. He gets to do this Wayne's World-type parody at EMC World, more of an appropriate venue because it's all engineers.

Companies that do things like that that are pretty funny to the point where I'll actually sit there and watch this episodes from EMC World, even though I'm not a storage person, to me it's still interesting.

I like companies that can poke fun at themselves.
Most companies, from a PR perspective, aren't willing to do that, and I think they miss out. >br> So, corporate blogs, I don't ever hear customers ever mention them at all.

Now, if it's a viral video - yeah, if it's something hilarious that goes viral, people will talk about it. And that's generally something that has humor around it.

But corporate blogs, as a general rule, I don't think they do a whole lot of good.

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