Building your brand name used to be about running commercials. No longer.
Today, with new technology, you still need to run commercials and do in-store, and all those other things. But now, you need to do other things, including posting content about your company on the web.
One of the easiest ways to do it is through WordPress, the open source software. The software is free; you just have to adapt it, and set up a content plan to make it useful. (Read our 10 Guidelines for Company News for ideas on how to run a company news program.)
Witness The Ford Story, a website that is all Ford, all the time. They publish it internally and cover every aspect of the Ford experience. It is dang brilliant.
A few other ideas for other companies. You don’t have to be a big company to think about content that complements your business. Industries and ideas include:
- Book publisher: If you publish books, use WordPress to promote your back catalog. Give each title a WordPress page, and allow readers to comment and add information about the title and the author.
- Hotel chain: Use WordPress to build a companion site to your main booking website. Give each property a “story” on the new website, splicing booking links throughout.
- Restaurant chain: Use WordPress to build an online cookbook with recipes, chef profiles and stories about your culinary tradition. Promote each individual restaurant as a unique proposition, including local managers and staff.
- Hospitals: Use WordPress to build a medical guidebook branded with your hospital name. Write stories featuring physicians, nurses and other hospital staff, as well as adding in other features on medical health.
- Consumer brands: Build a WordPress site around each brand, including historical information and current usage information.
- Airlines: Launch a guide to a destination, or build theme-based travel guides for special events and promotions.
- P.R. Firms: Build a thematic website for one of your clients on the fly.
- Newspapers: Create a micro-site around a special section or a major advertiser.
- Architecture firms: Use WordPress to promote your past projects, and keep them in front of the public.
- City or destination: Use WordPress to launch idea specific travel websites.
- Natural resources firms: Use WordPress to build an ecology-themed website featuring sustainable harvesting of timber.
- Energy firms: Launch a science-oriented site that explains energy usage and our need for oil, nuclear, solar, wind, etc.
- Utilities: With stories and diagrams, build a site that teaches students about how electric power is generated, and what the energy company is doing to help with conservation, etc. Use it as a recruiting and p.r. tool.
- Attorneys and law firms: Create a website with information with helpful stories about your areas of case law, as well as historical information about your prior case work.