Should you blog?

From the power of search engines, blog is the most essential and effective way for people to find about anyone or any organizations. Blogging can definitely generate returns for anyone who creates an interesting blog and regularly posts something value to it. There are many blogging platforms where you can have your blog.

Blog Platforms

According to the book The New Rules of Marketing & PR written by David Meerman Scott, I found 5 most important points in chapter 5, Blogs: Tapping Millions of Evangelists to Tell Your Story.

• First, we have to understand blogs in the world of the Web. Most marketers and PR people know about blog. Many of them use it to monitor what is being said about them on this new medium. A remarkable number of people use blogs for marketing purposes, some with great success. Blog is a special kind of website that is normally created by a person who has passion about something and wants to communicate with the world.

• There are 4 uses of blogs for marketing and PR: use for monitoring what people are saying about you, your company, or products; use for participating in those conversations by commenting on others’ blogs; use for working with bloggers who write about you, your company, or your products; and use for shaping those conversations by creating your own blog.

• There is a certain way to successfully reach bloggers around the world. It is true that an extensive majority of bloggers welcome contact from organizations. However, in order to be successful, the company representatives have to treat bloggers as individuals and provide them with valuable information that complements their work on their blogs. Do not send them the press release from your corporation.

• Being large and visible means being an easy target. The author suggested that large organizations should break boundaries like McDonald’s has done. McDonald’s has jumped into blogging by launching “Open for Discussion”, a blog that focuses on social responsibility at the company. “If McDonald’s is going to get credibility and trust, we have to participate in the community”, said Steve Wilson, senior director of global Web communications for McDonald’s Corporation. Comments from readers offering different perspectives are valuable on a blog because they can add credibility to your viewpoint by showing two sides of the issue.

• It is amazing what an intelligent person with passion can do with a blog. “It is better to have  a reputation than no reputation”, said Steve Goldstein, CEO of Alacra. Blogging is an effective way to get our name out there and put a face on our company. Blog is one way of communication with customers and prospects. If you start blogging early and keep the information flowing, you will be able to develop reputation as being innovative.
  

Personally, I believe that understanding the blog is the most important issue for marketers and PR people. As the author had mentioned that companies that ignore the discussion in the blogs about product or service reviews are “living dangerously”. Most media and PR people misunderstand bloggers’s actual role in disseminating information. Blog is like a large city teaming with individuals, and blog is the voices of those. The challenge for marketers and PR people is to find the meanings from the voices out there, and take in their ideas to develop into our own. By making use of the millions conversations found in the “Web City”, organizations can definitely become successful.