Blogging as a marketing tool

“Blog”. It’s the latest buzzword, is allegedly revolutionising new media, and is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore for those who spend time on line. Weblogs or blogs are increasingly being recognised by businesses as a powerful communication tool. In fact, the medium has become so important that Bill Gates has even launched his own website.

Simply put, a weblog is an online diary. It’s just another way to publish information. It’s a space where the author (often dubbed a ‘blogger’) can easily publish a wide variety of content to the web. Entries are typically short, informal and are posted daily.

Researching information, finding answers and making contacts are the main reasons people in business log onto the Internet. A blog can aid this process, resulting in online networking opportunities. Having a business weblog can be a good way for your customers to communicate with you, as well as between themselves, and in the process form new relationships.

Blogging is fast, low cost and offers a highly effective publishing, marketing and content management tool. However, before adding ‘blogging’ to the marketing mix, you should be sure you are clear why you’re blogging and what you want to get out of it. Do you want your customer’s views about certain matters?

Do you want to encourage communication between customers and your business? Once these issues have been addressed, you need to find someone to host your blog. This is a straightforward process and relatively inexpensive. There are sites dedicated to blogging that offer a free basic package.

If you key ‘weblog host’ into the Google search engine, you will be faced by many opportunities.

Although new, the success of blogging has given rise to a new industry; entrepreneurial media companies have introduced ‘blog monitoring’ where they scour the net to advise brands on how their name is being talked about online, away from the traditional print and broadcast media.

The idea behind this emerging service industry is simple. While there were only 130,000 sites four years ago, today there are about 10m. These web pages can make or break a company's reputation because they provide links to one another and allow people to comment on postings – in other words, the blog is a huge image-making network that cannot be ignored.

However, it is not only large companies that can benefit from a blog. For companies of all sizes, blogs are a useful tool. Why not start with a private, in-house blog, that is password protected, so that it can only be seen by certain users, for example a project team or company division. Staff can use in-house or intranet-based blogs for diary management, project tracking, arranging meetings collecting comments and publishing documents.

The key to success is to pick the areas in your business where weblogs can solve communication problems, then train weblog owners to anticipate and deal with issues in advance. With many blogs reaching thousands of people daily, many of whom also blog, it is time for blogging to be taken seriously in the marketing mix.

Norma Foster is general manager of www.n-e-life.com, the North East Regional Portal.