Advertiser 2.0

BlogWorld 2007 Shows the Value of Blogging and New Media for Online Advertisers

Yahoo! sent a crew of us to the BlogWorld Expo last week and, boy, what a ride. Clearly, blogging and social media have certainly come of age. Blogs used to be seen as hobbies for quirky Gen-Xers with an itch to share the banal details of their dreary little lives. You know: “Macaroni and cheese for dinner…again! Mom called at nine and ragged me for a half hour about you-know-what…” Blah, blah, blah…

Blogging and Your Brand
But BlogWorld showed clearly that businesses that ignore the vast, electronic mega-conversation that is today’s Internet do so at their own peril. As Clint Schaff of M-80 and Blake Cahill of Visible Technologies pointed out in their seminar, opinions effect brands, and no business can hope to keep on top of its image without engaging with consumers through new media. All it takes for you to lose perhaps thousands of dollars in business is one aggressive, disgruntled customer to start a network of negativity that could reach through the ’Net.

We’re going to hear a lot more detail on this topic from Blake and Clint in the coming weeks, so for now we’ll leave you with a choice quote from their presentation: “You can join the conversation now, or procrastinate and have join the conversation later anyway.”

Crowdsourcing
You’ve heard of outsourcing, where a businesses contracts with others to get certain tasks done. Crowdsourcing is getting people outside your company to help do your marketing—for free—through social media and word-of-mouth. It involves engaging your customers and getting them to wax poetic about your products and services on their own blogs and in social networks. Why have a marketing team of ten, the saying goes, when you could have a marketing team of 10,000? This is another topic that we’ll get into more deeply in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, explore blogging and social media as options to help your company engage with customers and guide the conversation around your products and services.

Here’s some more BlogWorld coverage from around the Web:

There’s more to corporate blogging than just begging your CEO to let you set one up.

Here’s a great list of video interviews by our friends over at Build a Better Blog.

Zac Jonhson blogs Marc Cuban’s keynote speech.

For Flickr photos streams, click here and here.

—Michael Mattis