Blogging and why its important to embrace this new medium
Most of you would have heard of the blog or blogger. Blogs are an ever growing medium of communication - where every one can publish their opinon online, interact with their readers and form communities - for free. People who ‘blog’ are called ‘bloggers’.
For the young its an important way to connect with their peers, for the enthusiast it makes it easy to find others who like the same things as they do and for businesses it enables you to talk directly to your consumers.
Even the very young are getting used to interacting with their peers using technology. My daughter has a Nintedo DS - a hand held game machine - one of Nintendo’s most popular games is Nintendogs where users can interact wirelessly, swap profiles, pass each other presents and chat. In effect they are being trained, indirectly, to communicate via thier profiles, with peers they have never met and perform transactions.
One of the most powerfull effects of blogging is the way people swap information about companies, products and services.
Personal recomendations by trusted sources and word of mouth are an extreamly powerful form of marketing. In fact there is a whole new business springing up around this concept. One company who has their finger on the pulse when it comes to analysing the blogsphere is Onalytica. Onalytica monitor what is being said about a particular brand or topic in the blogsphere, identify influential blogs and help companies better understand how thier customers are feeling.
One famous case is where Dell failed to service one of their customers correctly, who blogged about it and the corresponding fall out resulted in Dell’s share price dropping. You can download an interesting analysis of this case here.
But it is not only large companies who can benefit from the blogsphere, small and medium enterprises can too.
So what does this all mean for you?
As a business, no matter what size, you should seriously think about embracing this new medium as a way of communicating with your customers. If advertising, exhibitions, search engine optimisation and radio adverts are your current marketing channels maybe you should think about how you can engage your customer and build a relationship rather than pushing your services in the traditional way.