Many vendors continue to see themselves as the focal point of their customers' universe. Remember the "portal" concept? Seems like every vendor wanted to be a your portal to the internet. Comcast, Toyota, Apple, Microsoft... every vendor wanted to be your home page and give you a new email address. The expectation that customers will come to the vendor is rooted in a "vendor centric" mindset. The typical vendor home page emphasizes product and company information. People who attend our Effective Product Marketing and New Rules of Marketing seminars learn a more "customer-centric" approach, designing around personas and problems.
Bloggers expect that people will come to them but increasingly bloggers are going to the people. My RSS feed serves information to over 3,000 people time I post. Pragmatic Marketing offers RSS feeds for upcoming seminars and for all of our blogs.
Honestly, I haven't decided about how much I should put in my feeds. Should I just feed the first 200 words or should I send the whole post? I've decided to do the latter--deliver the whole post--hoping that people who want to know more will eventually come to the site. And this appears to be what's happening. My blog leads people to my ebook, The Strategic Role of Product Management, and ultimately to a Pragmatic Marketing seminar.
What are you doing to connect with customers? Surely you want them to find good information when they come to you but you also want to send information to them. If you haven't already done so, investigate blogging and RSS feeds to get valuable information to them.
Get a free RSS Reader from Google and then sign up for one or more of our blogs.
Update: Hey bloggers! Write an article for The Pragmatic Marketer and get featured on our blog roll.
