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The trend is growing at an accelerating pace with no sign of abating. Blogging (which started as a means of simply sharing a journal before it became a citizen publishing medium) carries tremendous potential for branding, for
thought-leadership, for announcements, for advertising and promotion, for building a bond of interpersonal connectivity with your company's customers, clients or readers. The
blogosphere, with the help of
search engines and the viral circulation mechanism of
social media has truly become perceived as the most credible podium in the court of public opinion. This is not a technologically-oriented blog on tips and tricks - it is an alert about the rise to to prominence of blogging, and how you can harness and focus its fabulous potential with an emphasis on marketing, and with none of the usual blogophilic debate about
Google (Blogger) versus
WordPress; new plug-ins, widgets and apps; search engine optimization (SEO) or meta-tags.
Of course,
blogging, as a practice is a
double-edged sword; do it brilliantly and you will win name recognition, credibility, increased business and marketshare, and valuable
customer loyalty. Do it improperly, and you stand to lose virtually everything. Either way, you must learn to use this powerful apparatus as a gardening tool or a weapon; you must learn very quickly. As a sponsor or author of blogs, you become a personality (even corporately) with a voice. The tone of that voice, as well as the content being set free to proliferate throughout cyberspace, will be judged.
The
information which follows was gleaned from an excellent article written at the beginning of this year by Ms. Autumn Morris, titled "
Technorati Predicts Continued Growth Within The Blogosphere For 2011." You can read the article in its entirety after you've finished reading this post by clicking *
HERE*. Ms. Morris is a contributing author for
Ignite Social Media. An excerpt follows:
Since 2009, all categories of respondents except for
Hobbyists report that they are
blogging more frequently. The top reasons for blogging more frequently were for valuable business promotion and for the enjoyment of interacting with readers. Blog growth is supported by other statistics:
- BlogPulse reports 51,938 new blogs created in the last 24 hours; 152,948,304 blogs overall
- WordPress reports continued growth with 27 millions publishers and 13.9 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com. See more WordPress statistics here and here. [Excerpt Ended] ####
Take a brief look at some charts furnished by
Technorati, generally acknowledged as the foremost blog rating service. These charts (you may have to magnify them a bit) yield quantitative information not only about the proliferation of blogging activity, but about the relationship between consumerism (both B2C and B2B) and the information provided by bloggers. Note the increasing influence that bloggers are having on consumer behavior. The first chart represents
2010 data, while the second chart represents
2009 data. The trends are continuing to favor the influence of blogs and of bloggers.
The article that you are reading (i.e., the one I've written) is using Blogger as a platform. The little graphic and hyperlinked tidbit which follow popped up on my screen several hours ago, when I started my work on this article.
