Give Them a Safe Next Step

For corporate communicators looking for a way to get subscription technology in the door of your organization, I suggest taking a line from Guy Kawasaki’s Selling the Dream (one of my favorite marketing books):

“[Provide] a safe, rational, and reasonable next step.”

While the benefits of applied subscription technology—blogging for instance—are clear to you, there are those in your organization who are thinking otherwise. “If we screw up in a corporate blog, everyone will see our warts,” they say. Most of the objections boil down to fear of failure.

So, how do you give your organization a safe next step into the world of subscription technology?

The safest subscription next step a tentative organization can take is adding a ‘feed’ to changing company content already intended for public consumption. Say your company press releases and news coverage, for instance. In your web site’s news room or press room or whatever you may call it, simply add a subscribe option to the top of the web page, and see what comes of it.

A good example of how this is done is the public relations firm Edelman’s ‘Latest News’ web page. They accommodate people who aren’t subscription technologists (those who don’t know what the little orange RSS subscribe ‘chicklet’ is for) by wisely offering a simple English language hyperlink: ‘subscribe.’ Subscription purists can just choose the chicklet. With these links, every time there is news about Edelman, subscribers immediately hear about it.

By offering this safe next step to your organization, you’ll accomplish many things including:

- Getting your webmaster’s subscription feet wet
- Accelerating company news delivery to anyone interested in watching your company or space
- Delivering a highly-visible, positive subscription technology experience that prepares the corporate culture for more

Oh, and there’s one more item:

- You’ll have beaten your competitors to the punch by doing something on your website they likely haven’t done yet

Once this is done, and you make your organization aware of the results, the subscription comfort level will increase, and vocal opposition will decrease. You’ll have an easier time of advancing other feeds initiatives.

Sounds like ‘win-win’ to me.