eBuzz - Should You Have a Blog?

Should You Have a Blog?

They used to be the equivalent of adolescent diaries — "what I ate for breakfast this morning" - but now, with over a million blogs on the Web, business and marketing blogs are fast becoming an important tool in any company's eMarketing repertoire.

Business Week recently reported that executives are finding blogs useful for plugging not only their products, but their point of view. There are now companies that do business blog consulting — an industry that didn't exist a scant few years ago. And there's even an annual Blog Business Summit (this year's will be October 25 - 27 in Seattle). If you Google "business blogs" these days, you'll come up with nearly 600,000 hits. That's a lot of people talking!

The real question for the marketing department remains: does it work? DMNews went behind the scenes to find out, and reported that it does, but perhaps not as much as bloggers would like to think. Results were "mixed, but upbeat," they reported on August 6. The company studied showed a 1% conversion rate on click-throughs as a direct result of the blogging.

Many companies are finding that blogs work best as marketing/promotional tools, often giving a human face or voice to a product or service being offered. This approach has been criticized (as in a January 2006 study by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln) as being too "gimmicky;" but the saavy marketer knows where to draw the line between honest promotion and the use of gimmicks.

What are the advantages of using a blog as a marketing tool?

• a unique way to connect with customers and prospects
• you can make your point without being interrupted (think of media interviews!) and with full control over the content
• it is, increasingly, the way people think.

This last point is worth — well, thinking about. The conversations taking place on the Net are increasingly interactive; blogs that allow comments are receiving more hits than ones that don't. The wiki movement in both information sharing and development arenas is a signpost of the future, where active rather than passive participation in information, business and marketing is fast becoming the status quo.

Before you start a blog, think about how it fits in with your business model, goals, and corporate culture. Simply having one isn't enough: but having one that works with your marketing plan can give customers and prospective customers a new venue for relating to your brand, in an interesting and unusual way.

And that's our take on the news today!

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