Blogging = $

The first few chapters of Naked Conversations (Scoble, R. & Israel, S. (2006). Naked Conversations. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 1-62) were well written and fun to read. What made the beginning of the book so enjoyable was the manner in which it was written, which was in the form of a story, focusing on Microsoft and how they attempted to achieve a more human image through the use of blogging. Although the writing may not be as deep as a “real” story, it did have some interesting characters and describe the resolution, or partial resolution, of a problem over time. The whole point of the story though was to demonstrate how the use of blogs can be beneficial to both a company and it’s customers/consumer market. Blogs allow for the human element of a company to come through and be visible to the public, as well as allow for informal two way communication between the parties. This is a valuable resource for companies that the authors claim will be essential to ensuring their success in the future. They put emphasis on how blogging should be used strictly for communication in the form of feedback, and not include advertising and marketing ploys. Company blogs are in themselves a form of advertising though since they are promoting the company and their image.

I think that company blogs are a good idea, and should be utilize by all companies since they are low cost and allow for direct interaction between company and consumer. I think that it does indeed promote a positive image of the company that says that they care about their customers and want to know their thoughts and opinions. I would not put company blogs on as high a pedestal as the authors do though, in that I don’t believe it will be as essential as they claim over the coming years. Also, I think only certain types pf comapanies could really use blogs to their full potential. Blogs should be set up for companies who consumers are really interested in and care about, or at least exist within the realm of an area of great interest to a significant amount of consumers. Basically, if it’s an area customers do research in. Some examples would be tech comapies (as mentioned), fashion, sports, music, game, and movie related companies, basically any area consumers are already interested in. Otherwise, I do not see companies drawn a large amount of consumers into reading about a company that exists within an area they had no previous interest in, even if they like/purchase their products. I can’t see myself posting a comment on or reading Charman’s blog about their new type of toilet paper…although that new quilted stuff is fantastic. I just can’t see the consumer interest.

Blogs to riches (Thompson, C. (2006). Blogs to Riches. New York Magazine, February 20. 26-35.) ocused mainly on blog popularity, it’s difficulty to achieve, and it’s causes. Th article describes how there is only a very small portion of blogs out there that receive high amounts of traffic (from the article I would categorize high traffic as in the hundreds of thousands of views per day). Even if a blog is essentially just as good as a more popular blog on the same topics, or even if the lesser known blog is pretty much a clone of it’s parent blog, it will often still not draw nearly as many visitors, and this is largely due to how many other sites link to that blog. These higher traffic volume blogs are referred to as A-list websites by Thompson, with the lowlier ones being B and C list. The article stresses the importance of “inbound links”, which are links on other websites that direct users to your website. Basically every time an outbound link is placed on a site, readers are diverted to another website. One can easily see why having tens of thousands of inbound links is the biggest contributer to an A-list site’s success. Thompson does mention though that inbound links are not always the only means for achieving success in the world of blogging, and gives the example of fleshbot, which is an adult blog which many people would not want to openly admit they visit, or link to, yet it has become very successful.

1 Comment(s)

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI