Class Blogging

Writing a blog is to share your thoughts and ideas regarding a specific topic. For example, blogs are independent and are considered Web-based journals containing opinions about anything and everything. Journalists, public relations and marketing professionals are quick to dismiss the importance of blogs because they often insist on comparing blogs to magazines and newspapers. But the blogger’s usual focus of promoting a single point of view is dramatically different than a journalist’s goal of providing a balanced perspective. However, blogging provides experts and wannabes alike with an easy way to make their voices heard in the Web-based marketplace of ideas. Companies that ignore independent product reviews and blogs discussions about their service or products are living dangerously. The challenge for marketers and PR people is to make sense of the voices out there and to incorporate their ideas into our own. Organizations have the power to become tremendously rich and successful by harnessing the millions of conversations found on the Web.

As a starting point, all marketing and PR people need to go to blog search engines and run a query on their organization’s name, the names of their products and services, and other important works and phrases such as executive’s names and competitor’s names. This allows you to see if any of the 112 million blogs that it tracks have any information you need to know. Google Blog Search is another popular blog search engine. Remember the more sophisticated marketers can then start to analyze trends. So become an expert in what’s being said about your organization on blogs. There has never been a better time for marketers to get a true feel for what’s going on in the real world. Bloggers provide instantaneous and unsolicited comments on your products, and this free information is just waiting for you to tap into it.