Mele’s Musings

Marketing Moves to the Blogosphere

Perhaps the action of starting a blog in and of itself is a path to moving a company toward more open communication.

Picture: rodjohns.typepad.com

Article excerpt:   Jason Calacanis, who got into blogging early and big, has quit. He co-founded a network of blogs called Weblogs in 2003, before the medium cracked the mainstream, and then sold it to AOL in 2005, working there until 2007. Today he is chief executive of Mahalo, a search engine guided by editors rather than algorithms.  After five years of writing on tech industry topics as well as personal ones and building an audience of 10,000 to 20,000 daily visitors, Calacanis said he got tired of all the nasty commenters and opportunistic “link-baiters,” people who post just to promote their own blogs.  So he signed off, leaving the blogosphere to others. One group that has been firing up its keyboards is corporate types. Of the approximately 112.5 million blogs on the Web, almost 5,000 are corporate, according to blog indexer Technorati. Calacanis blogged to start conversations and be a part of a virtual community, but corporate bloggers are in it for other reasons: talking directly to customers or giving a personal touch to a big business.
The rest: washingtonpost.com

Musing:  Overall, corporate blogging is still relatively small, but it seems that some of the more advanced corporate blogs are really about open communication rather than just PR or marketing speak.  The explanation of Bill Marriot’s blog is interesting – he writes about the company and sometimes just movies he’s seen.  While there appears to be real revenue generated from visitors to his blog, I wonder if people really care?  Perhaps some like that fact that Bill Marriot appears to be just a regular guy.  But the power of corporate blogging is not found in giving a voice to the “face” of the company, but in giving a voice and forum to customers, and to opening up real communication with them.  It seems, though, that making the commitment to having a blog in and of itself leads companies to be more open in their communication – maybe because they just have to.