If you are an engineering or technology company, there are plenty of reasons to run a Blog. You might want to use it as a way of generating more visitors to your principal Web site or it could be a method of dealing with technical queries and feedback from customers. It might be a way of promoting yourself using news about your company and industry or it could be a way of establishing a position of thought leadership in your sector.

I thought it might be interesting to use these Monday articles on optimisation to share the reasons that engineering, manufacturing and technology companies Blog. So, in the first of an occasional series of interviews, Don Mahawatta of Clearwater Technologies answers questions about his company’s industrial news Blog, Factory-Automation.

What does Clearwater do?
Clearwater Technologies Inc. is a small industrial automation supplies distributor in Boise Idaho USA. We represent 40 plus manufacturers like ABB, Banner Engineering, Hammond, Toshiba, TURCK, FUJI, Hitachi, IDEC, Panasonic, SOLA etc. Our goal is to provide the best customer service in the industry and our hope is that from our excellent customer service we’ll be able to build customer loyalty.

Why did you decide to use a Blog as part of our marketing strategy?
We set up the Blog to get extra exposure for our main site and the product lines featured there. However, we didn’t get new products or news items from our manufacturers daily, so we decided to publish related news items about new products, services, improvements or findings from the manufacturers that we don’t represent.

How do you plan to develop the Blog in the future?
Our current plan is to publish at least few news items a day.

Factory-Automation is a great example an industrial business using a Blog to publish information that doesn’t directly promote their own products lines or services as a way of establishing a position of leadership in their sector. The fact that the company publishes news that will have no direct benefit to them, other than populating their Blog, in exactly the same way that a commercial publisher would do, demonstrates that in social media it’s often what you give away for free that delivers the highest return on investment. There are plenty of reasons to run a Blog and this is one of the best.