Читать книгу Marketing in the New Media - Holly Berkley - Страница 25

Donald Trump has a blog. So do Michael Moore and Ariana Huffington, as well as thousands of celebrities, musicians, business executives, and average people. Blogs (also called “weblogs”) provide a way for nontechnical people to post information about their personal lives, beliefs, politics, businesses, products, services, or anything else in a chronological, diary-type format. Many blogs allow visitors to provide feedback on those comments as well.

Since 2003, the growth rate of blogs has doubled about every six months, reaching 35.3 million in April 2006. According to Technorati (http://technorati.com), a blog tracking site, the Internet world sees an average of 1.6 million legitimate blog posts every day, many posts related to new product announcements and scheduled events (Burns, April 2006b).

Blogs are an important marketing tool for your business for many reasons. First, they allow you to develop a closer connection with customers, to generate feedback, and to provide customer support. For an example of a corporate blog, take a look at GM Blogs (www.gmblogs.com) — the General Motors home for their corporate blogs.

The second reason blogs are an important piece of marketing is because they are a great way to help increase search engine ranking for your site. Because blogs are largely text based, they are easy for search engines to index. And because every entry includes a date and search engines look to post the most recently updated site first, your blog has a good chance of ranking high. If your blog entry contains relevant keywords, a recent date, and links to more pages of your website, you have a good chance of increasing your ranking. Likewise, because blogs open products up to consumer feedback and word-of-mouth marketing, you are more likely to find both media and consumers referring to and linking back to your blog, which provides added points to increase your search ranking.

However, despite the impressive growth of blogs, corporate blogs still account for only a small percentage of the current blogosphere. Although many executives realize their importance, they are either unsure of how to make blogs work effectively for their company or they simply lack the time and energy to keep a corporate blog updated and running (Burns, May 2006). (More about corporate blogging and how it can enhance your brand and consumer trust in Chapters 3 and 7.)