In preparation for the upcoming winter fest, my wife bought me some Thinsulate gloves. These things are the coolest ever – transforming gloves!

Basically they’re fingerless and have a strip of velcro attached to the back of each glove. Attached to the velcro (and sewn to the glove itself) are mitten tops.

So, I get the best of both worlds. I have driving gloves if I want them, or simply fingerless gloves if the weather’s cool but not too cold for full-on gloves. Yet when the cold snap comes in, I just flip a (velcro) switch and pull the mitten part over, and I have full gloves. Genius!

And as I flipped the Transformer glove from fingerless to full this morning, I thought of how we can transfer this to our blogs…

Make Your Blog a Transformer Glove

There’s a lot of information available at the minute, and we’re providing it to each other every day. It could be on Twitter, LinkedIn groups, PDF or ebook downloads, video uploads, Slideshare presentations and much more. Yet a lot of this is fractured.

Sure, we may offer (or receive) great information via any one of these mediums, but are we really taking advantage of what we can present and help with? Are we concentrating too much on one medium or solution and not seeing the bigger picture?

For example, are businesses offering a full solution to both consumers and partners/clients, or simply offering mouth service to one while the other chooses from the full menu? While some information needs to be kept separate, a lot doesn’t (or can be a stripped down version).

Here’s how it could work.

Integrated is Not Hard Work

Let’s say you’re a business with a new product and you need to educate both retail partners and prospective customers about all the great features and benefits. You know that social is one of the best ways to market this information, but how do you satisfy two different audiences?

You don’t – instead, you satisfy them together, as one.

• Set up a blog as your information hub. This is where all the cool stuff will stem from.
• Make cool video snippets about some of the best features and how to make the most of them and embed on your front page and rotate regularly.
• Build relationships with expert bloggers in your product’s niche and ask them if they’d be interested in guest blogging with exclusive access to your product range. This helps cement brand loyalty and collaboration with your existing audience, who can help you grow while they, in turn, are officially recognized as product experts.
• Regularly include your audience by asking what they’d like to see on the blog.
• Have a Twitter account that can answer quick and easy questions from both consumers and sales reps. For more in-depth questions, direct to your blog hub.
• Write up the best tips and advice into downloadable content (ebooks or slide deck presentations). Encourage sharing.
• Award regular visitors and contributors with special discount offers or free samples.

See how quickly you can build up a resource centre for what is essentially two different audiences, yet can benefit from a single source point? And the single source builds itself, by allowing others to take the reins.

The Transformer Glove switch bit? That’s your behind-the-scenes area for retail only. You have all the front-end support for both customer and retail channels, but then you have a password-protected area where only retailers can sign into, for special incentives and rewards on selling your product. This information can be delivered via point-of-sale messaging or similar.

Your Transformer Glove

Even if you’re not in business, you can still make your personal blog your very own Transformer Glove with integrated solutions. Make your blog a little home from home to offer more answers about you.

If you look at my navigation menu, you’ll see I’ve added a Photos feature. These are basically my Facebook photos, but all collected here (via the Fotobook WordPress plug-in). Now, instead of having to go to Facebook to see more personal stuff, you get it here.

This offers a two-fold solution – it brings fractured networks to a single point, and it also offers a little bit more about who I am. By sharing that I enjoy photography and music, for example, I’m offering a more personal side to the business voice that might normally be found here.

If you want to use a business analogy, it’s (hopefully) building brand loyalty between provider (me) and consumer (you, the readers), just like integrated solutions for business can appeal to both consumer and client/partner channels.

Can you see the benefit of this approach? What else would you use?

photo credit: Jentymom