Worth It? The Net Worth of the Net, is YES

Brent Leary, in Brent's Blog, had a very cool entry a couple of days ago on a site that can figure out the monetary value of your blog - at least in a manner of speaking. It values a link at something between $500 and $1000 and applies an algorithm and yada yada yada. If you're interested in that, go to Tristan Louis' site and read this entry. Its an interesting read.

While that's cool and fun and interesting, what made Brent's entry important is that he identified something that I think all CRM vendors need to take heed of and I quote:

"It's time for CRM vendors to create more perceived value with their blogs, and for most of them to actually create blogs in the first place."

He is just plain right. The numbers that the blogs are valued at (by their links) is staggering in their nothingness. The MOST valuable of the vendors is salesforce.com around $3K or so. Some of them are valued at an outright ZERO. Meaning no one is paying attention to them, least of all their own companies. They are not using blogs, syndicating blogs, providing easy access to blog feeds, publicizing their blogs, optimizing their blogs - many of them because they don't have blogs.

At least I think they don't.

Which goes to further prove the point.

Fact is 57% of those in the U.S. online read blogs according to a recent PEW Internet study and, in fact, 8% write blogs. You would have to assume that in the world of high technology vendors, most of them are fully acquainted with blogging and that anyone who is likely to use their software or services - especially when it came to the on demand world, would have at least a passing acquaintance with blogs as well as those who have the impact to affect the stock prices of the software vendors - likely they know what blogs are. I would venture to say that of that 57% - all of the groups I just mentioned fall into that demographic.

So why is it that the blogs of the CRM vendors are "worthless." Because they make them that way. Same with podcasts. I think that salesforce.com is the only one that attempted a podcast that I know of, though SAP might have and are smart enough to.

Thing is that their potential customers are still customers in the same way that all customers are in the 21st century. They want authenticity. They want a view behind the corporate firewall. CRM is supposed to be about all that - developing relationships of trust with your customers so that they become advocates. Supposed to be, because the marketing departments of the CRM vendors don't seem to use the new tools that are available to them freely.

Why shouldn't they? If they are leading the charge with the 21st century customer, then they should be the first to adopt the new tools to communicate with same.

Don't cha think?

I KNOW many of them read this blog. I DARE them to use the comments section and give me a response by providing links to their blogs. Keep in mind, though, Brent taught me how to find out what they're worth. So, CRM vendors, make it worth it.

Technorati : CRM, blogs

Comments

[Kingsley Joseph]

Hey Paul, response post coming up after my 4-o-clock, but here's our *main* blog: http://blogs.salesforce.com.