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As if being a parallel world wasn’t enough, the
World Wide Web has added another sphere to its environment-blogosphere.
A space where expressions, interactions thrive and communities
are built. An opportunity to publish thoughts for bloggers
and ‘space’ that may be a new channel for
reaching out to ‘potential customers’ for
marketers.
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Starting
out as personal diaries, where people could share their
opinions on a myriad of topics, blogs have evolved into
a new channel for advertisers and corporate communications
tool for many businesses.
How is this new environment going to benefit marketers
and communication managers?
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Reaching
out to the bloggers |
| Marketers
have always been in search of the right channel of communication
for the right target audience. If we were to look at
the ‘blogging space’ as a ‘Niche site’
created by bloggers based on their interests and ideas,
discussing issues such as health or finance, we might
have arrived at the possibility of delivering communication
to a core or a potential customer. Blogging, thus in
its essence for a marketer bears its resemblance to
contextual marketing.
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Blogs:
A marketing and customer relationship tool |
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Moving
away from using the space on blogs for targeted communications,
corporate blogs are being used to engage customers in
subjects of product interest, (Microsoft:http://msdn.microsoft.com/community),
use it as an effective mechanism to judge customer feedback
or lending promotion specific ‘brand support’
to a blog theme ‘Art of speed’ by Nike and
Gawker (blog publisher http://www.gawker.com/artofspeed).
Google’s corporate blogs described as ‘insight
into news, technology and culture of Google’ is
a perfect example of letting customers interact with
employees, along with acting as a window to their businesses.
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| Predicting
the benefits of investing the marketing monies in to
the ‘blogosphere’ is a tad difficult. It
may remain a passionately guarded private-public space
where people share their experiences or may become an
essential part of the marketing mix. Given the trajectory
of growth of this medium, marketers however may not
be able to ignore it for too long either, even if as
an experiment.
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Blogging
Statistics* |
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*Secondary
Research
Christine R. Carl, A.B.2003 Bloggers and Their Blogs: A Depiction
of the Users and Usage of Weblogs on
the World Wide Web
Daniel W. Drezner & Henry Farrell, 2004 The power and
the politics of blogs.
www.imediaconnection.com
www.clickz.com
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| Useful
Links |
| Blogger.com |
Google.com/groups |
Groups.yahoo.com |
Gawker.com
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| Rediff,
Indiatimes |
popular
Indian blogging sites
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