Welcome to our venue for getting personal.  This is where we’ll share our know-how and stay in touch with our professional community. It’s also a platform for others to speak out on trends, best practices and their own insights. It’s a space to open up about our experience and our experiences, and process our processes…and I’ll start off with our thinking about this very blog.

So how do we –or you– know if it’s right to launch a blog? Or the right time? When it seems like everyone’s already blogging, why should anyone start something new?

In our case, we’ve been recommending blogs and social media for clients for sometime now, as part of a robust integrated marketing strategy including other initiatives like email campaigns, search marketing, PR, speaking at conferences, etc. We set our own marketing priorities just as we would advise our clients. First we redesigned our website so that it effectively presents our experience, services and brand personality, and rigged it so it brings in leads and subscribers to our newsletter. Second, we swore to doing our monthly newsletter, Loewy’s Latest, with no excuses, once a month. Now is the blog, and next up is our Facebook Page, Twitter…all the social media we provide the strategy, design and technology for to our clients.

Basically, before starting to roll out social media for our own company, we spent time generating a sort of critical mass through other outlets: optimizing our website to build more traffic, creating a larger pool of contacts through our email newsletter. Now that we’ve achieved that critical mass, it’s time for us to take it further – expand our network and allow the conversations to become less one-way.

A blog is an appropriate choice for us because it’s a good fit with our brand: conversational, friendly, smart, and collaborative.  It’s also a good fit with our goals. We have a lot of experience to communicate but we’re also are always looking for ways to improve and stay on top of emerging trends. Our blog will let us do both.

So how’s your website doing? Does your online identity fit your branding strategy? Does your website’s overall experience match the quality of your products and services?  Are you getting leads, selling products, building awareness or even getting traffic?  If the answer is yes, then maybe you’re ready to do a blog – because you have an audience, a tone of voice and a network. You’re ready to be a thought leader in your industry or at least have an opinion. Of course you can have a blog without a corporate website, and you can even make money at it.   But if you’re like us, and most of our clients and peers, your website is critical for doing business online, disseminating information, and creating the first point of contact for all potential customers.

Let’s say you’ve got it all together and you’re ready get started.  Keep your blog focused, stay in tune with what you know and be relevant to your game.  Yes, there are many blogs in your industry, but any niche or network can use fresh thinking, so don’t be apprehensive. Like any tool, if it is available and right for you, then use it.  Make sure it doesn’t duplicate what your site is already doing for you and your audience – consider it an avenue for a different kind of messaging and communication.

For us, we understand that our audience is an intimate group of professionals looking to share best practices for doing business online. In upcoming posts we’ll be engaging our network and sharing our points of view on what we do best: providing the strategy, design and technology to companies that value the power of the internet. We’re kicking off the dialogue with several topics each month, coming from senior Loewy staffers with different areas of expertise.

Here’s to getting social. We’ve opened the floor, now we invite you to join the conversation…and if commenting is not your thing, just stop by and say Helloewy.