I wanted to point out an interesting convergence that I noticed today on blogging and branding in a ‘pre-brand’ phase. (maybe everyone’s already seen this idea, so I could be behind the times here)

The authors of Squarespace published a blog entry on their experiences with a pre-launch blog and it’s value in establishing a company and their brand way in advance of an official launch (advertising, press releases, blah.) which I find to be right on target and illustrative of the quintessential audience-connecting essence of a weblog.

One needs to look no further than the weblog that Worthwhile magazine had running well in advance of the publication of their first hard copy issue. By design or by default, the weblog has been a success in many measures. Subscribers to their RSS feed in Bloglines are over 160 (not bad – considering it’s just Bloglines, but Scoble’s 3,407 subscribers puts that number into a different perspective.) leading me to believe that they’ve achieved a significant reach in a short period of time. A marketer’s dream is always to have a market waiting for their product – an eager and loyal brand community waiting on their toes, even before the ‘brand’ officially exists. (it does exist though, in the hearts and minds of the constituents, if you take the Lovemarks perspective on this)

This whole pre-brand blog concept has me rethinking my presentation strategy for a paper “GeoFree Brand Comms: Building Brand Communities Using Blogs.” The premise of the paper is that non-geographically bound brand communities could be developed and sustained through weblogs (I know, there are already brand communities supported by the web…) in addition to other media. Frankly, I was having a hard time in the beginning with the unique value proposition of weblogs in this context, but some recent articles, particularly this one from CFO magazine, have crystallized my thinking. The bottom line: People want to connect with people. Blogs, in many ways, and for a lot of reasons, have become just the next most logical way for many of us to connect with our customers, and for our customers to get to know us. It’s really not much more complicated than that.

On that note, I’m thinking that a pre-launch blog case study might be warranted for the upcoming AMA business blog conference. Should be fun!