Interview: Blogging, Companies, and Community

Making Memories is a great TypePad blog from a craft and scrapbooking supply company that wanted to connect with the people who use their products in a personal, organic way. What could be more perfect than a beautiful, easy-to-use TypePad blog. I asked Jenny Weston from the company a few questions about how and why Making Memories blogs, and how it's been such a runaway success for getting in touch with their community.

How long have you been blogging with TypePad?
We have been blogging with TypePad for three years and for the most part, update it with new posts daily. As one of the nation’s leading scrapbook manufacturers, Making Memories started a company blog as a way to reach out to our customers and involve them more in the day-to-day happenings here at our Utah headquarters. We use the blog as a way – we hope – to inspire our readers. It has evolved into a community forum to give the readers a chance to be recognized by others. 

What’s been your favorite post?
Our favorite posts are the contest and MM giveaways! At least once a month, we host everything from video contests, immediate feedback contests, guessing contests, etc. We receive great responses from our readers because they love the chance to participate and win prizes. During our most recent contest – which took place live in conjunction with our largest trade show – we received more than 38,000 comments. Needless to say, that was a landslide record for us! One participant even spent ten hours postings with her husband for a chance to win a prize valued at $200. This translates into what we call “loyal readers!”

We constantly ask our readers what they want from the blog, which allows us to adapt to their changing needs.  Based on their feedback, they never tire of inspiring projects and tips to help them create memorable projects.  Because of that need, a lot of the content we provide is inspiration – inspiration in the form of weekly challenges, seasonal projects, scrapbook organization tips, etc.

How has your blog and community evolved so successfully?

We started this blog as a way to connect to our community of readers. What has happened, though, is that all of us at Making Memories have become more motivated to provide increasingly creative and problem-solving products.  Thanks to our customers’ fanaticism, the bar has been raised on what we expect of ourselves.

Visit Making Memories.