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This article originally appeared in Business Lexington.

Blogging in Business - A new requirement or wasted time?

Scott Clark - Aug 11, 2005

It felt a little like 1995. But instead of textual websites on our just-installed Mosaic browser we’re watching large scale social change. No longer held back with basic technical issues such as screechy 14.4 modems and dropped connections, we are free to pick up our keyboards and start blogging. But should we, as businesses, get involved?

This isn’t an article about how to build a blog. In the time it takes to read this article, you can learn the format of a blog by following a few links. To those who haven’t already read about them, blogs are like linked public journals with their own etiquette, culture, and, yes, power.

But don’t get too attached to the mechanics. Formats will come and go, bubbles will burst, and so on…but the concept of “accessible democratic publishing” is here to stay. What I see is a collision of important trends, and at the core are well-educated, self-directed and web savvy customers. This is why it affects you.

Formats will come and go, bubbles will burst, and so on…but the concept of “accessible democratic publishing” is here to stay.

First we can start with the obvious trend: a steady increase in the numbers of consumers using the web to get information. Almost 70% use the web for product and service research, and 55% read blogs, which means blog-influence on the buying public is a very real issue. This is especially true now that the search engines are indexing blogs mixed with regular websites and competing for the attention of your customers.

This is important. It’s generally estimated that 80% of all web traffic comes from search engines, so if a powerful (well-linked) blog has something to say about your firm, they can easily out-rank your website in Google. If they manage to shift you down a spot, you can kiss as much as 50% of your traffic goodbye. If it’s all good news, you win, as they’ll probably link to you anyhow. If not, well, you get the point.

Related to this, the new, in-your-face “ratings” built into sites such as Yahoo! Local often represent a potential customer’s first impression despite the small number of people providing the feedback.

A third trend is the growth of loose social networks. In Chains, Frigyes Karinthy wrote about how any two people on earth are connected by no more than five intermediaries. But these connections have been inefficient, bound by the friction of the interactions. The Internet is frictionless, and nobody is control. New blog posts flash across the RSS readers of people in the network like stock prices in a Merrill Lynch office, and the news is spread.

Where there are shake-ups, there are opportunities.

While social networks mature, traditional advertising’s effectiveness fades. Between September 2002 and June 2004, for example, consumer attitudes toward advertising nosedived: 40% fewer agree that it’s a good way to learn about products or services, 59% fewer say they buy products because of their ads, and 49% fewer find ads enjoyable. Anti-advertising efforts collectively slammed the door on many mechanisms. 57% of consumers registered for the Do Not Call list, 20% use spam and online ad blockers, and the 43% are interested in using DVRs to skip ads on their TV.

Getting a message to consumers on your company’s terms is becoming very difficult. Participating in blogging works as a sort of un-marketing where openness gets more attention than a pitch, so it’s not the place to push the company mission statement or to request people call customer service to help with their issue. It’s an open-door policy where you’ve just invited everyone to get to know you personally. Those comfortable with the tidiness of press releases and check-box media buys are in for a bumpy ride.

There’s more. Earlier this year, the major portals announced that they are tying together services like searches, ratings, and the blogosphere and introducing these new tools to hundreds of millions of their customers. This includes Yahoo! 360, Microsoft’s MySpace, and Google’s Orkut. While these big players weigh in, RSS, the protocol of blog notifications, was recently adopted as built-in part of Internet Explorer 7, which will raise the number of people with an RSS reader from 8% to 70% almost overnight.

Where there are shake-ups, there are opportunities. I will write next about how your firm can thrive as your customers take the pilot’s seat. And just like channel 9 on in-flight headsets of United Airlines flights, you can get a lot from just listening to them talk to each other as they land.

©Scott Clark - If you wish to syndicate this article, contact me.

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