Why every product manager should blog

In this article, I specifically talk about the B2B environment which I know well and implies few customers. Some of the ideas I mention though, should be transferable to the consumer business.

The traditional way of communicating product information to customers, prospects, partners, internal sales force, or journalists (in brief, all product stakeholders) is today quite complicating, not efficient and not rational.

Indeed, for a product launch, a product manager has to prepare a set of marketing materials to be distributed among stakeholders. This set generally includes brochures, powerpoint presentations, sales guides, case studies, press release, price list, etc… Once these materials are ready, they are either printed (brochures) or simply kept in computer format. In the latter case, documents are placed in an internal server or in an internal document database, accessible to employees only. For external stakeholders, launch materials are put in a FTP server and are remotely accessed through a password.

The problem is that employees rarely check out internal servers because they simply don’t know they can access these documents, or because the path to access a specific document is simply too hard to figure out. FTP servers used by external parties are most of the time difficult to handle, and the username and password of these FTP servers is never known or forgotten.

Email is often a substitute, but a really bad substitute. Besides, which Product Manager did not have this type of request from a sales rep: “Hey, I can’t find the presentation for my customer, could you email it to me? Actually, my customer is in a rush to make a decision, so could you email it right now?” Of course, the Product Manager will email it, but first he has to stop what he was doing (business first!), then he has to dig in the internal server to retrieve the file and, send the file by email. Generally the file is too heavy to be sent by email, so the Product Manager will lose an additional 10 minutes to convert the powerpoint document to a low res PDF. Do you know the worst thing with this story? The same sales rep will call the same product manager one week later, for exactly the same request. This time, the sales rep will say: “Hey you know, the file you sent me last time was very useful, but I can’t find it back in my emails. Could you send it back to me, thanks!”

The problem of having marketing files stored in servers is that they are not easily accessible. There is also a huge waste of time in trying to find them back.

The answer to this problem is to make product managers setup their own blog. In this blog, a product manager will be able to write information on new or existing products. The blog can also be used to announce new products, and it may include several posts describing the traditional information released in a product launch, such as product features and benefits, positioning and messaging, and pricing. It also may include for example, very detailed information about specific features, information on how to get the most out of the product, product manager’s viewpoint about the product or product manager's answer about specific customer issues. In addition, the blog can include links pointing to the documents I talked about previously (ie. Powerpoint presentations, sales guides, price lists, etc…).

The blog can be designed specifically for one product manager, but I actually recommend to design the blog for one product or one product family, because if the product manager changes, the blog will stay there! The blog also looks more “official”, when it is designed by product.

To launch a new product, the product manager will tweet the Blog’s URL to the stakeholders and ask to check out the blog. The product manager will of course have setup a tweeter account beforehand, and included the maximum number of stakeholders as followers. One thing to do is to include the sales reps in tweeter and ask them to retweet the blog information to their own followers, who are actually their own customers.

By doing so, all product stakeholders have an easy and convenient place to get and retrieve the product information they need.

One can argue that if a blog is easily accessed by everyone, it can also be accessed by the competition. We can therefore imagine establishing user level security in order to access sensitive materials. We can also imagine having a blog on the intranet available for employees only, and in the extranet for customers or partners.

But all this might be too complicated and might involve the IT department which will turn this idea into a long project.

This idea of organizing a product launch around a blog can actually be done very easily and quickly. You can refer to my previous blog on how to setup a blog. Basically, you need to setup a domain name, a hosting server and a blog software application. I personally use Godaddy.com for domain name and hosting, and WordPress.com for blogging. If you are not afraid to go deep into WordPress, be aware it is feasible to protect any individual post with a password (check out this link in WordPress: http://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/post-visibility/). There are also some ways to protect an entire blog and make it private too. Anyway, you can ask someone knowledgeable who can do it for you. Lastly, because you rent a hosting server, you have lots of space available to put the launch materials in your blog and make them accessible to your stakeholders (When setting up the hosting server, options are whether 10GB or 150GB. Space is not infinite though… Be careful with movies which are very heavy and difficult to download. Prefer compressed PDF files instead of big Powerpoint files, because the blog's bandwidth can be low).

To conclude, organizing a product launch around a blog is quick and easy to do. It will not only increase your product’s visibility, but it will allow you to get a better communication with all your stakeholders. If you are afraid of putting sensitive materials in your blog because of the competition, don’t do it, but don’t refrain yourself from blogging because of this matter! You can communicate many other things to your customers. Anyway, there exist ways to protect your blog or specific posts. The potential benefits of blogging are huge and give you a real competitive advantage!