A Blog for the Online Edition of Quickbooks

After a weekend of camping with my old high school rugby mates, I returned to civilization to find what may be a hidden gem in my feed aggregator (the Sage RSS/Atom aggregator extension to Firefox if you are wondering).

Via the Business Opportunites Weblog: Quickbooks Weblog (a pretty good resource itself actually), I found The Official Quickbooks Online Weblog. It launched last month, and so far I like what I see.

Basic Training

While it may seem obvious to bloggers that the Online edition of Quickbooks should have a blog, many of their clients may not be aware of the blogosphere. Within their first five posts, they answer the perennial question What is a blog?, provide a syndication overview in Automatic Updates via RSS, and invite comments with the appropriately named We Welcome Your Comments. A nice start, combined with permalinked versions in the top left navigation to make it more obvious to those that need it.

Target Audiences

Judging by the nature of their posts, I’d expect that The Quickbooks Online team have a few target audience groups defined for their blog: current users that want to provide feedback and/or get support (see above re: inviting comments), accounting professionals, small business owners that are using their product, and perhaps one of the most important – small business owners that aren’t using their product (or any accounting software for that matter). Within the first month they’ve provided something for all of those different audiences, in just 22 posts. It’s likely a safe bet that this was by design.

Providing Value

Value is subjective as it is almost always judged by the receiver. In this case, I’ll subjectively say as a Quickbooks user (but not the online edition), I already perceive their blog to be of value. They have already posted links to two items in the Resources for Small Businesses section, and they have provided a few posts in their Tips & Tricks section, designed to make people more productive with their product. It’s not like this is a new concept – it is one of the fundamental building blocks of a sound web strategy. I like to think of it as marketing without the BS, and search engine optimization without the snake oil (like my namesake Derek of penmachine says: Boosting your search ranking: it’s no trick). Not only did they provide value to current customers/clients, they also provided value to propsective customers and casual surfer with some of their external links.

Incidentally, I like the way they don’t force new windows on users when external links are activated. Don’t keep people at your site by forcing them to stay — keep them at your site by providing valuable content and resources that will make people want to come back.

Connecting with readers

In addition to simply “having” a blog and putting a new form of communication in the hands of their readers, they have also highlighted a few client stories and even include quotes and links to some of their client web sites. (Yes, they need to do some work on their Information Architecture – though I’m sure they will soon see that the post categories for “Client Stories” and “Stories from Our Clients” should be merged.)

There aren’t any comments yet for any of their entries. I’m curious to see how long it will take for clients to actually engage with the company through this medium… One post I found interesting was Reconcile Report Enhancement, where they show some feedback from a subscriber and how they responded by making adjustments in their software. Cool. They listened, and they told readers that they listened. The reader’s voice becomes part of the value to the company.

Strategy

I’d suspect that this is the kind of thing that Paul, Mike and Matt over at Business Logs were thinking of when they started their business. I think it is great that Intuit (the makers of Quickbooks) has taken this on, but I have to wonder: Will this take off? Will the power of weblogs help their business? Will enough of their subscribers be in tune with blogs in general to make it worth the resources they are investing in the blog?

Only time will tell, so now I’m really going to watch them — not only because I’m interested in the content they are providing, but also because I want to see what I can learn from them about working with my clients.