Thursday, August 11, 2005
Corporate America Discovers Blogs
That emerging marketing strategy is creating a new career: corporate bloggers.
At times, individuals who run online journals known as blogs - or Web logs - have been a thorn in the side of big companies, generating bad buzz about products and airing unhappy customers' complaints to a wider audience.
But some companies are taking a different approach, hiring corporate bloggers to get their messages out to the blogosphere.
This really confirms my opinion that blogs will continue to evolve and become a more powerful tool for marketing than it is now. Even Google news (beta) added an RSS feed to their bag of tricks.
Simply put, blogs are becoming a useful marketing/communications channel. A channel that currently fits into a very focused niche and demographic but as I have written before, this channel will grow exponentially over the coming months and years. It's an effective and efficient way to publish and interact with your target audience (customer). Properly done, it can be a method for your existing and potential customers to learn about your small business products or services, ask question or simply get comfortable with you through your effective online communications.
From a corporate standpoint, Mary wrote that large companies like GM are encouraging their employees to blog and other companies are hiring experienced bloggers to write and publish positive articles, current information and responses to inquiries. It's a great idea if the resources are available to do so.
Unashamed commercial interruption
Currently, SOKY.NET is developing a blog application that will allow a business owner or organization to mass publish their blogs, (to send a posting to several free blogs all over the Internet) and also post on their own own website. There is one feature that I am particularly proud of and that's the post dated blog entry which allows the site owner to enter several posts at once and schedule their publication over a specified time.
From a small business standpoint, blogs can be useful tools and could very well be an avenue worth investigating. It doesn't take long to learn and properly set up, can be as easy as sending an email to yourself. Frankly, if I had a real staff (instead of partners or family) I too would encourage (require?) them to blog weekly for my small business. It's simply a way to keep my message on top of the competition and we all know that is the goal.
Prediction: Public relations and marketing firms will start offering this to their clients. From instruction and guidance to in house writers and technicians. I really do see it going that far. For independent/freelance writers, this may very well be an emerging opportunity for Career or revenue.
