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Blogging: More Than Idle Chatter

Posted on | October 21, 2009 | No Comments

By Leigh Buchanan, Max Chafkin, and Ryan McCarthy |  Feb 1, 2008  Inc. Magazine

With 100 million blogs now online, you may feel as though the last thing your website or the world needs is another one. But if you don’t have a blog, you might want to reconsider. That’s because Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), the great arbiter of Web success, has a particular love for blogs. When compiling its vaunted rankings, the search engine appears to favor websites that are updated frequently and are linked to by other webpages. Given these criteria, blogs have an outsize influence on the results. And blogs are more than a way to game Google. A surprising 66 percent of North American consumers trust blogs as a source of product information, according to a 2007 survey by Nielsen.  The trick, say experts and longtime bloggers, is restraint. “For marketers, it’s about being more authentic, which is so ironic,” says Peter Kim, senior analyst at Forrester Research.

Moreover, blogs can help a company establish a human connection with customers. By being personal and idiosyncratic, they soften the antiseptic feel common to many corporate websites. Blogs can also help you tap into one of the overarching trends in marketing, which is that companies are now striving for an ongoing conversation with customers, rather than one-off, short-lived campaigns.

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By Leigh Buchanan, Max Chafkin, and Ryan McCarthy |  Feb 1, 2008 Inc. Magazine 

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