Blogger Stories: Allison Gower

Allison Gower launched her blog to support her new social media business; she soon discovered that readers were tapping into her blog for more than just tidbits about the industry. Allison learned that her blog helped build credibility for her innovative concepts about mobile marketing.

Blogger Story Teller: Allison Gower, All About Qtags; The Platform

I got started blogging when I launched Qtags in Spring 2005, on the advice of PR specialist John Wagner of Wagner Communications. He had been blogging for about a year and was convinced that the blog would be a good forum for qtags to make connections with a community of advertisers, agencies, media channels who were interested in and actively searching out alternative communication strategies. I was game and started All About Qtags, as a corporate blog for Qtags text in April 2006, with much guidance from John on the etiquette and blogosphere do's and don't's.

At first I was uncomfortable with the medium, worrying about offending and being too self promoting (a vice John really warned me about!). Over time though I started hitting my stride and discovered that the beauty of blogs is that they can be a support for each author's objectives, as varied as those may be.

For example, most of the blogs I followed at that time were authored by freelancers of various fields who among other things, were using their blogs to create awareness for themselves as a resource. In my case with All About Qtags, I wasn't trying to create awareness for me, but instead to provide market context for an emerging advertising approach.

I soon found that people weren't reading me for my (pithy) observations on the state of advertising but instead, they were visiting the blog for support information re: sms text in advertising, case studies, documents and presentations they could use to present the concept of qtags text to their clients or associates. And maybe most importantly, I believe that visitors were using the blog to validate that Qtags the company was legitimate and not a fly by night operation to avoid.

The blog was a good way to monitor the company from afar, stay anonymous and control the interaction with us qtags the company (which interestingly, is exactly how qtags text is designed to work for consumers, allow them to remain anonymous and control interaction with advertising).

Having a corporate blog, if written in a legitimate, accessible manner, lends credibility and through the blog I was then able to establish relationships with other bloggers from all walks of life. This ability of a blog to help a new company and its principals to establish relationships is invaluable.

As I told Stephen Baker from Business Week when he interviewed me as an example of a business blogger in the Fall of 2005, writing a blog makes you open your eyes wider and create a larger community than would be done with offline strategies. This in and of itself validates the blog for a corporation. This interview appeared in the Fall print edition of Business Week Small Business.

In the late Fall of 2005, I started The Platform, which is a corporate blog for a manufacturing company I founded in 1998, The Platform Group Gallery. I was inspired by Zane Safrit of Conference Calls Unlimited and his approach to word-of-mouth communication with his business customers and his blog to support that, and decided to create, through a blog, a community for my packaging customers.

While neither of my blogs are A-list in terms of traffic, they ARE A-list in terms of helping my customers and supporting them with resources and feedback and making our companies accessible to them.

Thanks to John for opening up the possibilities of blogging!

Alison Gower
For my details, text 'allison' to: 78247 [qtags text is spam-free]
[email protected]

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