Can Saab Be Turned Around?

There are turnarounds of an average degree of difficulty, and then there are turnarounds that might take a couple of years off of your life.

Bringing Saab, the Swedish automaker, back from near-death, is probably in the latter category.

Just a quick recap, for those unfamiliar with the Saab story:

Saab originally made airplanes (and a subsidiary spun off long ago still does), developed a prototype car in 1949, started selling cars in earnest in the Fifties, entered the U.S. market, and developed what could probably be accurately called a small but fanatical following in America. Saabs were quirky, front-wheel drive when almost nothing else was, extremely safe, very economical, and, last, but hardly least, had design that was truly innovative and different-looking.

Interest In Blogs Among Teens and Young Adults Fades

If your organization or business has young people as a target audience or target customers, here’s hoping that you are reaching them through your Facebook site or your Twitter feed.

Surprising no one that follows social media, the most recent data available shows that fewer young people are keeping blogs, and more importantly for businesses, fewer young people are visiting blogs.

The sentiment driving this behavior seems to be a combination of:

• A feeling that writing a blog takes too long
• Low readership of small blogs
• Facebook and Twitter are meeting whatever needs they have for self-expression

Business Blog Primer

BLOG ME

If you’re a business these days, you’re supposed to have a blog to go along with your company website. The reasons why?

Well, it can keep your customers informed, for one. It can provide a great platform for your customers to interact with the company, for two. Third, it’s a great way to keep talking about the company in a positive way. Fourth, it’s a good way for the company viewpoint on issues to be delineated, if that is important to the business. Fifth, people may actually come to your site just to read your blog, or, some other site may find something interesting on your blog and link to it, thereby driving potential customers to your site. Sixth, each new blog post (and each new comment, if you allow comments) is yet another reason for the search engine bots to crawl your site, thereby moving you up in the search engine rankings, which is always good for business.

Okay, so a lot of good reasons to have a company blog. The problem is, of course, just as with other things, the execution. Apropos of that execution, how do you get a blog, how do you get good, relevant content for the blog, and how do you keep it going?