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Blog Bits - Week of October 24th

Jeremy Pepper from POP! PR Jots addresses an article written in the New York Times on “the whole new era of customer evangelism with blogs.”  While Pepper was reading the article it made him think about the differences between “corporate evangelist blogs, true consumer evangelist blogs and the old school days of enthusiast websites that seem more and more relevant today.”  The article mentioned many blogs including Hacking Netflix, Tracking Trader Joe’s, The BarqsMan and McChronicles and pointed out that some of the companies (Barq’s parent company - Coca-Cola) did not even know about the blog, The BarqsMan, and others are tracking the conversations such as McDonald’s with McChronicles.  Pepper points out that in-house corporate PR people or PR firms should be doing what McDonald’s is doing - “tracking conversations, and jumping in when needed, or hey, even offering previews of new products and offerings… you know, the old school PR skill of working with media, being that bridge.”  Pepper continues his post with talking about how there is a fine line between the corporate blog and the customer blog. 

As noted on MarketingVox, “A best-guess extrapolation of blog-related surveys and data suggests that work time spent reading and posting to blogs this year will consume 2.2 percent of U.S. labor force hours, and work time spent on blogs unrelated to work will take up 1.65 percent of those hours, reports AdAge (via MediaBuyerPlanner).”  About one in four people in the labor force visits blogs and on average spends 3.5 hours during the work week engaging with them.  Although this report my be a concern to corporation’s HR departments – it validates that more and more people are starting to read, post and create blogs and corporations should be tracking what they are saying.

Blog Business World’s Wayne Hurlbert posts on how Article Submissions are a powerful technique for adding additional readers to your blog.  “Articles also provide powerful inbound links to your blogs or website, adding strength in the search engines.”  Hurlbert points out that both sides benefit when writing and submitting an article, “By writing informative & interesting articles, on your topics of interest, free long term publicity for you and your blog are achieved…Website owners are constantly seeking fresh and informative content for their own site visitors and your articles can provide them content.  In return for your free article, your blog or website received a return link.”  Hurlbert also addresses that many questions arise on where to send your articles for submission and includes a link to a website with many article submission sites. 

Posted by Jeri Weaver on October 28, 2005 at 02:22 PM | Email this post Permalink

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