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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
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