Marketing Essentials 2012

Chapter 10: Interpersonal Skills

eMarketing Feature

Weblog (blog)
A Weblog, also known simply as a "blog," is a special type of Web site that is updated frequently by the author. Anyone can start a blog and share it with friends and the community at large on the Internet. A "blogosphere" is a community of bloggers with similar interests. For example, there are blogospheres for music, entertainment, finance, health, travel, pets, and so on. Businesses can use blogs to communicate with customers. The CEO of a company may use a blog to share the company's philosophy, update everyone on new policies or company goals. For example, take the design of a new automobile. A customer might post a comment on the CEO's blog about being dissatisfied with the design. The CEO (blogger) can then respond to that comment and perhaps mention other improvements that were made to the auto and note that the company is still working on the issue noted by the viewer's comment.

Individual bloggers in various blogospheres may inadvertently help businesses by posting positive comments about a product or service. Those comments can provide free publicity for a company and even help to start a favorable trend that could help the image of a company and the sales of its products. However, bloggers can also attack a company which could create negative publicity. Many companies have employees or outside vendors search the Internet to look for comments made by individual bloggers about their firms. That data information mining is useful in market planning.

Innovate and Create
Have students create their own blogs either for fun or for a business purpose. In order to attract viewers to a blog, the topic needs to be of interest to others. Suggest a "Back to School" blog or another topic of interest to students for their blogosphere community. Have students write a blog and create entries for five days. Each day have other students react to the blog as viewers.