Blog expresses company voice in employees’ own words
For a retailer of premium coffees, job one in the marketing arena is to differentiate the offering from that of industry behemoth Starbucks. At Stone Creek Coffee, a nine-store café chain and web site headquartered in Milwaukee, WI, one of the weapons of choice is a web log.
“We wanted to bring out that we are a hands-on company and not a big corporate chain. We are trying to reflect the personal nature of what we do and how we make our coffee,” says Tom Pionek, marketing and technology director. “The blog lets us bring that out by letting our people post information in their own words.” The blog, launched on StoneCreekCoffee.com this month, will eventually let team managers, executives and store managers post content live and for the most part, unedited by Pionek, who oversees the initiative.
The company`s bloggers will receive guidelines on what kind of information can be posted. Pionek will review the blog posts when they go live and make adjustments if necessary: an RSS feed that pushes the blog out into the online blogosphere sends it to his desktop in real time.
Pionek adds that Stone Creek Coffee`s primary objective in blogging is to express the voice of the company and that a blog—basically, an easy to use online publishing tool—lets the company do that quickly and in a timely manner. For example, the company cups, or evaluates, new coffees and coffee roasts every two weeks. “The blog allows us to cup coffee in the morning and post the results of what we found that same day. It reduces any bottleneck about getting content out on the web site, just by making the ability to change the web site more accessible to more people,” Pionek says.
Pionek adds that when the blog was launched on the site and announced in the company’s e-mail newsletter, a click-through to the new blog was the top-used link in the newsletter. For now, though, the company is applying no traditional metrics to the blog. “Eventually, we’ll look for standard metrics such as click-through from products mentioned in the blog to products on the e-commerce site,” says Pionek. “We expect during the course of working with the blog to identify what those metrics should be.”
One such metric is now emerging. Google`s algorithm is believed to favor fresh content, and because blog content can change frequently, it’s expected to help boost the web site’s placement in natural search results on Google. Pionek said that’s already happening. “After we started the blog, our search rankings for a couple of terms went up. We were nowhere to be found and then suddenly, we were on page three,” he says.
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