Business Blogs as Tools for Helping

“Journalism students at IUPUI took advantage of the Super Bowl festivities in Indianapolis by working as reporters and social media experts,” reports the IUPUI website.

As an executive career mentor at Butler College of Business, of course, I can appreciate the benefit of this “real life, real business” experience the student journalists are receiving.  But the aspect of the article I found most interesting from my business blogger’s point of view was this:

The focus isn’t on touting the Super Bowl – or the restaurants, hotels, and transportation companies in town.  Instead, the focus was to have the students use social media as a tool for helping.  In one example highlighted in the article, “the Social Media Command Center team monitored Twitter feeds in order to offer help, directions, or other services”.

Since the work I do as a freelance blog writer and corporate blogging trainer has everything to do with enabling people to search for and easily find the information, products, and services they need, I liked what the students were doing to help visitors navigate our town.

Ease of navigation (as I stress when offering business blogging help) is absolutely crucial to the success of any SEO marketing blog. From the manner in which the corporate blog page is set up to the corporate blog content writing, the process must be smooth.  (One of my favorite cautions is that frustrating potential clients is to be avoided like the plague.)  In fact, the emphasis always needs to be on helping, never on selling.

Unlike the case with us content writers, for the Super Bowl student journalism students, identifying their target customers is not a challenge.  But, like us, that team was tasked with appropriately signaling to target customers that they understood and were dedicated to serving those customers.

The more your customers “see” how you understand them and are dedicated to helping them, the more differentiated and persuasive you become, according to local marketing professional Amy Lemen.

Even with as desired and popular a “product” as the Super Bowl, journalism students were learning, social media (and especially business blogs, I’d add!)  efforts work best when they are used “as a tool for helping”.