New Microsoft blog focuses on customers who do amazing things with its products

Microsoft blogs are plentiful, focusing on products, services, milestones, news and other themes. The argument could easily be made that the organization didn’t need one more. Instead, though, Microsoft’s newest blog, Transform, has won first place in the “Blog” category of PR Daily’s 2017 Content Marketing Awards.

Transform focuses on Microsoft’s customers and partners and the things they do with the organization’s technology. These are “the stories that we tell our families over dinner at night, the stories that make us proud to work at Microsoft.” 

Launched in spring 2016, Transform has achieved hundreds of thousands of engagements across multiple social media channels, and its performance has continued to improve every month. 

Stories include the tale of a hospital in Missouri that developed an app to monitor babies born with a serious heart disease, a post about how household water heaters were converted into an “internet of things”-fueled, cloud-based power grid, and how one customer created a tracker to find out if his cat was gaining weight from eating at other homes in the neighborhood (resulting in a social network for pets). 

The team behind the blog spent about five months building and refining Transform’s editorial processes, leading to audience growth of 805 percent. If further proof of Transform’s effectiveness is needed, consider that the team that manages it is routinely pitched with story ideas.

Kudos to Meg Manazir and Monica Fisher for an outstanding blog.