Blogs offer PR Tool to Small Businesses
This article was originally printed in Greater Wilmington Business Vol. 7.6, June 2006.
Many of you have heard of blogs- they're referenced throughout your favorite newspaper, many major nightly news programs plug them at the end of their broadcasts, and they are accredited with Howard Dean's initial grassroots success in the 2004 Democratic primary. Technorati.Com, a website used to search blogs, is, per their webpage, “currently tracking 34.6 million sites and 2.3 billion links”.
This is all well and good, you might be thinking, but what does this have to do with my business? Everything.
Think of blogging as a PR tool that will help spread the word about your business on the Internet. (If your target market does not contain "web-savvy customers" now, it soon will.)
In this article, I'm going to define blogs, show examples, demonstrate how to search and create them, and give examples of blogging as a PR tool.
Blog is short for web log and can be most simply thought of as an online diary. A "blogger" posts "diary entries", including pictures and text, which are immediately visible to everyone on the internet. Readers can post comments in response to each entry and in response to other comments. The result is a more interactive and less private version of a diary. This unfiltered authenticity and ability to reach millions with one click of a button is what has the mainstream media (MSM) in an uproar. In fact, you can feel free to respond to this article on the http://www.EntreMagnet.Com blog.
Blogs can be used as a PR tool to spread information about your company and its products, to create bonds with your customers, and to personalize your brand. Bob Parsons, the CEO of GoDaddy.Com, one of the largest domain registrars in the world, displays an excellent example of this at http://www.bobparsons.com/. His business philosophies, including the concept of "making a little money off of a lot of people", are what pulled me and millions of others into transferring their domain names to GoDaddy.Com. When I was chairing a “Bridging the Digital Divide” conference, I utilized a blog to promote interest and discussion about the conference and the digital divide itself. The “Digital Divide” blog can be found online at http://digitaldivide.blogspot.com. Another source of using blogs as a PR tool can be found online at http://www.scoutblogging.com/blogs101.html.
You can search the blogosphere, as the world of blogs has been called, using Google (http://BlogSearch.Google.Com) or more specialized search engines like http://www.technorati.com, http://www.blogniscient.com, or http://www.blogpulse.com . Blogniscient will give you the top 10 blogs in a variety of topics such as Business, Entertainment or Sports, and is an attempt to filter the millions of blogs on the Internet into more manageable and relevant categories. If you click on the Tag section (“tag” is another word for “category”) of TechnoRati.Com, a webpage displays the most popular search tags, using larger font sizes to indicate the more commonly searched terms. Immediately, you can zoom in on what are the more controversial or discussed topics on the blogosphere. As I write this article, Bush, (Google) Calendar, Iran and Microsoft are the tags of the hour.
What’s the cost of all of this fancy technology? Blogger (http://www.blogger.Com) and MSN Spaces (http://Spaces.MSN.Com) are both providers of free blogs. Take a minute to register, choose your blog name, your favorite theme (color scheme and page layout), and you are ready to start blogging!
If you need additional features such as a calendar or the ability to categorize your blogs, then take a look at Typepad (http://www.typepad.com) or Blog Harbor (http://www.blogharbor.com). Their costs start at around $9/month and go up with amount of space you require. Also, many hosting companies (like http://ww.GoDaddy.com or http://www.1and1.com) offer basic blogging services for about $3/month.
Ideally, I’ve given you just enough information in this article to make you dangerous. You’ve learned what a blog is, how to search them, where to create them, and how you can use them to promote your business. So, what are you waiting for? Get out there and start blogging!
Many of you have heard of blogs- they're referenced throughout your favorite newspaper, many major nightly news programs plug them at the end of their broadcasts, and they are accredited with Howard Dean's initial grassroots success in the 2004 Democratic primary. Technorati.Com, a website used to search blogs, is, per their webpage, “currently tracking 34.6 million sites and 2.3 billion links”.
This is all well and good, you might be thinking, but what does this have to do with my business? Everything.
Think of blogging as a PR tool that will help spread the word about your business on the Internet. (If your target market does not contain "web-savvy customers" now, it soon will.)
In this article, I'm going to define blogs, show examples, demonstrate how to search and create them, and give examples of blogging as a PR tool.
Blog is short for web log and can be most simply thought of as an online diary. A "blogger" posts "diary entries", including pictures and text, which are immediately visible to everyone on the internet. Readers can post comments in response to each entry and in response to other comments. The result is a more interactive and less private version of a diary. This unfiltered authenticity and ability to reach millions with one click of a button is what has the mainstream media (MSM) in an uproar. In fact, you can feel free to respond to this article on the http://www.EntreMagnet.Com blog.
Blogs can be used as a PR tool to spread information about your company and its products, to create bonds with your customers, and to personalize your brand. Bob Parsons, the CEO of GoDaddy.Com, one of the largest domain registrars in the world, displays an excellent example of this at http://www.bobparsons.com/. His business philosophies, including the concept of "making a little money off of a lot of people", are what pulled me and millions of others into transferring their domain names to GoDaddy.Com. When I was chairing a “Bridging the Digital Divide” conference, I utilized a blog to promote interest and discussion about the conference and the digital divide itself. The “Digital Divide” blog can be found online at http://digitaldivide.blogspot.com. Another source of using blogs as a PR tool can be found online at http://www.scoutblogging.com/blogs101.html.
You can search the blogosphere, as the world of blogs has been called, using Google (http://BlogSearch.Google.Com) or more specialized search engines like http://www.technorati.com, http://www.blogniscient.com, or http://www.blogpulse.com . Blogniscient will give you the top 10 blogs in a variety of topics such as Business, Entertainment or Sports, and is an attempt to filter the millions of blogs on the Internet into more manageable and relevant categories. If you click on the Tag section (“tag” is another word for “category”) of TechnoRati.Com, a webpage displays the most popular search tags, using larger font sizes to indicate the more commonly searched terms. Immediately, you can zoom in on what are the more controversial or discussed topics on the blogosphere. As I write this article, Bush, (Google) Calendar, Iran and Microsoft are the tags of the hour.
What’s the cost of all of this fancy technology? Blogger (http://www.blogger.Com) and MSN Spaces (http://Spaces.MSN.Com) are both providers of free blogs. Take a minute to register, choose your blog name, your favorite theme (color scheme and page layout), and you are ready to start blogging!
If you need additional features such as a calendar or the ability to categorize your blogs, then take a look at Typepad (http://www.typepad.com) or Blog Harbor (http://www.blogharbor.com). Their costs start at around $9/month and go up with amount of space you require. Also, many hosting companies (like http://ww.GoDaddy.com or http://www.1and1.com) offer basic blogging services for about $3/month.
Ideally, I’ve given you just enough information in this article to make you dangerous. You’ve learned what a blog is, how to search them, where to create them, and how you can use them to promote your business. So, what are you waiting for? Get out there and start blogging!
posted by slidesage at 4:25 PM
2 Comments:
Great, to-the-point blog on blogs (I read it in the June 2006 issue of Greater Wilmington Business). It provides solid info not only for small businesses but also for economic development organizations looking for inexpensive marketing tools. I'm a partner in an economic development consulting firm, Sanford Holshouser Business Development Group, LLC, Raleigh. Our monthly e-newsletter is sent to the ED community in NC and several other states. The concept is free advice among friends in the business of ED. Our articles usually are written by one of our partners, occasionally by a guest. We would greatly appreciate using your "PR Tool" article as our guest article this month. Please let me know this week...we publish next week. Thanks. Bob Comer
Hi Bob,
Thanks very much for your comment.
Absolutely, any organization can benefit from the PR exposure of blogs and the notion of instant publishing.
Glad to see that you'll be utilizing it in your newsletter.
Thanks,
Matt
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