You have assigned me with a task of researching the subject matter of blogging and how it may impact our developing business. Let me begin by going over a few blog related terms.
Blog, short for Web Log, is a Web page that served as a publicly accessible personal journal for an individual. Typically updated daily, blogs often reflect personality of the author. Related to blogging is a term of blogosphere, which is an expression, used to describe a ‘world of blogs.’ Taking the process further, users can utilize blogging to push an event or subject to mainstream news creating a blog storm. There are many common or slang terms that explain various phenomena that occur in the world of blogging. A blog storm is when the blogosphere collectively writes thousands or more posts about a particular subject, topic or event, and as a result, the story is picked up by mainstream media and carried over to newspapers, television and radio. Blogs can also be used in various situations. A crisis blog is a blog created only to handle a business public relations crisis. Crisis blogs enable a company to immediately respond to an allegation or rumor. This type of a blog would also be considered a b-blog, although b-blogs, short for business-blogs, are mostly used by a business to promote itself. They can also use blog and ping, an online marketing term applied to a system that utilizes blogs and pings (short for pingback) to deliver content and/or sites for indexing in search engines with the ultimate aim of profit. It is also called blog ping. Individuals, as well as companies, can also utilize astroturfing, a slang term used to mean ‘artificial’ blog buzz. In the blogosphere people can blog about a new product, which in turn prompts others to blog the product’s message. When the original blog(s) have been started by a PR company, it is called astroturfing. A v-blog, or video-blog, it used to describe a blog that consists of video clips. It is also known as vog. Stemming from the definition, similar to blogosphere, a vlogosphere is an expression used to describe the ‘world of video blogs’. If you are interested in searching the blogosphere, you can use Technorati or Google Blog Search – an Internet search engine that indexes and searches blogs. Technorati tracks blogs and other forms of citizen media, including video blogs (vlogs), podcasts and amateur movies and videos in real-time. All this activity is monitored and indexed within minutes of posting.
Now that we are familiar with the blogging methodology lets look at some statistics gathered by Weber Shandwick, a public relations firm:
- 81% of U.S. online consumers trust information and advice from blogs.
- 37% watch online videos about someones experience with products the are considering.
- Average buyer consults 11 consumer reviews on the path to purchase.
- 61% of U.S. online consumers made a purchase based on blog recommendations.
- 77% of Internet users read blogs.
- 57% of companies with blog have acquired a customer from their blog.
- Keywords i blogs drive traffic from search engines.
- 23% of total Internet usage time is devoted to social networks and blogs.
- Blogger is the leading blog site in the U.S. with 46 MM unique monthly users.
Let us now go over some of the effects of blogging on businesses in order to help us understand, whether we should consider devoting time and resources to development of blogs related to our business.
Increase Our Reputation - if we provide a blog with high-quality, informative content, we can establish our Company as a knowledgeable leader in our industry. By taking advantage of the high blogging traffic and public interest we can address common concerns and problems faced by our clients and show our expertise as well as understanding of the industry and customer needs. We can thereby build faith in our Company's ability to help them. We can show our customers that we care about helping them by offering helpful tips and advice through our blogs.
Attract New Clients - as stated in the research note above, 57% of companies with a blog have acquired a customer from their blog. The Internet makes it easy to share information and experiences with products, services, places etc. Utilization of blogs can give us exposure to potentially clientele we were unable to reach using the traditional methods of advertising.
Pre-Screen Prospects - by answering the concerns and responding to inquiries posted in the blog, we can address commonly asked questions in-depth, and pre-screen our potential clients before the call or make an appointment to come to one of our offices. This will help our sales force i targeting people that are truly interested in our products and services.
Improve Customer Relations - interacting with customers, whether it is face-to-face or via various media, helps build and cultivate relationships. As stated above, 77% of Internet users read blogs. We can again reinforce our interest in customer satisfaction by utilizing blogs.
Increase Online Presence - we operate our business in the world of free information flow and constant technological changes. Updated information about the products and services we offer will help us get ahead of our competitors. Google, the largest search engine, will re-index our blogs every time we update them with new content, thereby placing our site higher in the search engine rankings. Getting better traffic will enable us to reach more potential clients.
Based on the information above, it is my recommendation to devote the effort of two members of our IT team to develop and maintain a customized blog. We can then designate team members from our sales and marketing divisions to provide updated information on our product and service offerings. I recommend utilizing our customer service team to respond to customer inquiries and complaints.
Should you require any additional information I will gladly research the subject matter and further report my findings. I am convinced that setting up a blog will benefit our company by increasing customer awareness of our products and services.
Best regards,
MKO
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