Alison Graves Worldwide PR Manager for HP’s Enterprise Imaging and Printing Busines

Today my PR partners across the hall, over in the land of “small to medium” (SMB) business marketing, announced a new offering from HP that is so cool, I just have to share. Normally, we wouldn’t be writing about something for SMBs on this blog, but if smaller businesses start using this new tool from HP, they might find themselves moving up into the land of the giants very soon. (HP defines an SMB as a company with less than 1,000 employees, and enterprise companies are those that have more than 1,000.)

Here’s the deal: more and more companies are creating blogs. Forrester has some interesting research to show you exact stats. Whether you work for a small company or a huge multinational, blogs have become a viable medium for communicating with customers. I remember years ago when I worked for a PR agency and we were doing news releases when companies created their first web site. Nowadays, not having a website would be the story. Soon, the same is going to be true for blogs – you just gotta have one in your customer communication toolkit or you’re going to fall behind the competition.

The challenge is that if you work for a smaller company, you might not have the marketing resources – staff or funds – to design a blog and kick-off that great new vehicle for customer relationship building. If you work for a business function within a larger company, like a marketing team for a new product, you might face similar hurdles. Sometimes (not that I’m condoning this practice) business functions within large corporations need to act as their own small businesses.

Now, thanks to Logoworks by HP, businesses that decide it’s time to enter the blogosphere, can build their own from one of four different blog design packages. The best news for companies on a “you can’t squeeze blood from a turnip” budget, is that the templates are free. Yes, you read that correctly- free. You can get a blog template from an award-winning designer for free.  

I have lots of friends, family, neighbors and acquaintances who run small businesses who could really use this service. In fact, I’m about to send them all an email with the link to the blog designs so they can get moving on this. If they need a little extra hand-holding to get started, they can check out our free webinar on blogging by small business expert, Chris Baggott. 

Once again showing my true dweeb self by quoting Randy Jackson from American Idol, “Check it out.”  And, hey, did I tell you it was free?

Technorati tags: enterprise printing, hp, Hewlett Packard, logoworks, smb, blog templates