El Cajon, CA. – As a modern day business owner, developing a personal brand has never been more important. Competition is fierce and customers are demanding a more personalized touch. In an effort to add a “face” to his company, Jim Kalb, founder and CEO of electronics components manufacturer, OptiFuse, has created his own digital footprint via a personal blog –a first in his industry.
The OptiFuse Blog, launched in 2009, is a weekly newsletter with over 5,000 subscribers, and is shared via the company’s other social media sites, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The company has about 16,700 Twitter followers.
Blogging for business is not a new concept, but Kalb has taken it a step further to ensure that he adds some personality to an otherwise tame business. In doing so, he has become OptiFuse’s No. 1 brand ambassador.
By creating a thoughtful content strategy, Kalb has attracted blog followers and fans (customers and non-customers) around the world, with many loyal readers as far reaching as Australia, India, and China.
For Kalb, it’s all about relationship building and trust.
“A blog allows you to speak casually to a wide range of people, including your current customers and distributors, as well as potential customers who have no personal experience with your company,” said Kalb, whose motivational blog topics include personal musings on his life experiences, thoughts and observations. “Through a blog, and the comments that readers write, you can create a casual conversation that builds real relationships with people that matter most to you and your company.”
Recent research conducted by Domo found that 30% of Fortune 500 CEOs have a presence on at least one social channel. According to a study by Weber Shandwick, about two-thirds of customers say their perception of a CEO directly impacts their opinion of the company. Social CEOs build their personal brand whenever they engage on social media; they also improve the company’s brand when they do it in an authentic and generous way.
OptiFuse – a world-class manufacturer of circuit protection products such as fuses, fuse holders, fuse clips, fuse blocks, circuit breakers, resettable fuses and accessories – has grown its sales from $800,000 to $3.6 million since the inception of the blog in 2009. The company provides products to both the electronic and automotive markets and includes well-known customers such as Harley-Davidson, Volvo Trucks, Honeywell, GE, and Tesla. OptiFuse sells its products through a vast network of wholesale and retail distributors such as Napa, Fastenal, Grainger, Waytek and Carlton-Bates / Wesco.
Kalb believes a big part of OptiFuse’s growth can be attributed to pioneering a personal touch in the industry.
“Our customers now know us as the ‘human company.’ Together we talk about our kids, our fears, our hopes, our dreams and our loves – these concepts are universal, whether you’re in America or Asia; they are an integral part of everyone’s life,” said Kalb, who founded OptiFuse in 2001. “The company has continued to touch people due to the human face we put on a sterile product in an industrial environment.”
One of OptiFuse’s customers and regular blog readers is John Johnson, district manager of the Carlton-Bates Company, a leading distributor of automation controls and electronic and electromechanical products. “The blog that OptiFuse sends out weekly has hit home with customer and market conditions that my sales team can relate to,” Johnson said. “We’ve had the pleasure of handling the OptiFuse line of products for years. OptiFuse has continued to offer not only standard fuse type products, but unique items to help our clients at competitive prices with reasonable lead-times.”
Kalb – who has experienced the highs and lows of a competitive industry and fickle economy – launched OptiFuse in the middle of the dot-com age, when “everyone wanted to fund ‘sexy’ high tech companies, not an old industrial, bricks and mortar fuse company.” When investors turned him down, Kalb and his team decided to fund and grow the company themselves. Then, in 2008, the financial and housing markets collapsed, triggering hardships for many companies, including OptiFuse. As a cost-cutting measure, most non-essential travel was cut from the OptiFuse budget; the company created an email/blog campaign as a new, cost-efficient way of reaching out to customers.
In July of 2009, OptiFuse suffered yet another setback when a bicycle accident sent Kalb to the hospital for two weeks. From his hospital bed, with a chest tube in his abdomen and IV in his arm, Kalb wrote that week’s blog post describing his condition to his readers. The message that week was about optimism and hope in the face of uncertainty, fear and danger.
“That blog I sent from the hospital was a turning point for OptiFuse,” Kalb said. “It was a message that people wanted to hear during a really uncertain economic time. The blog’s readership quickly grew from a few hundred to a few thousand almost overnight.”
Kalb, who studied electronic engineering and entrepreneurial management at MIT’s Sloan School, had finally hit a nerve with his customers. He began to leverage that to help develop personal relationships with existing and potential customers.
“We sell B2B. Unlike B2C marketing, our buyers are professionals who aren’t spending their own money with the same emotional attachment that they would by going out to a restaurant or buying a new pair of shoes. They have very specific needs,” Kalb said. “In most B2B marketing, very little effort is being made to create personal connections that go beyond a professional relationship. Changing the consciousness of the buyer is what we are trying to do. We are trying to give them a reason to select us. It’s just like Bill Clinton’s famous saying, ‘I feel your pain.’ That’s what this blog is about. Our two top competitors each have a 100-year head start on us – they own 90 percent of the marketplace and are publically traded, so they have to put their shareholders in front of their customers. That’s where their true allegiance is. We need to differentiate ourselves. Our type of blog is completely new and innovative for the B2B world in the electronics and automotive industry.”
About OptiFuse
Founded in 2001, OptiFuse is an innovative manufacturer of high-quality circuit protection components including including fuses, fuse holders, fuse clips, fuse blocks, circuit breakers, resettable fuses and accessories. The company is headquartered in El Cajon, Calif., with a sales office in Taipei, Taiwan. The OptiFuse Blog archive can be found at http://www.optifuse.com/blog. More information at http://www.optifuse.com/.