Bogged Blogs Bite Business

For techno-savvy business people blogs are the new e-mail newsletter.

Quick, easy to set up, quickly catalogued by search engines and the opportunity for instant feedback, blogs (short for web logs) are popularly being used by businesses to offer opinion, share information and host newsletter articles.

To see an example of a blog visit ours at http://www.bcm-online.blogspot.com/.

With the emergence of blogs comes aggregators that compile how popular someone’s blog or post is by the number of recommendations. Sites like Technocrati operate passively, based on the number of visits and the number of other people leaving comments and/or cross posting.

Others like Digg, Newsvine and del.icio.us require readers to hit the link to raise the profile of the story. Readers who go directly to sites like Digg can read the posts, rate whether they like it or not and make comments.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is, like all unmoderated, self-serve environments, the risk of abuse is great.

While it might be no surprised that political blogs like the American site Little Green Footballs might come under fire from political opponents, business web sites aren’t immune either.

Consider the poor owner of blog Cre8pc on Usability & Holistic SEO who had been ‘Dugg’.

“I had joined Digg last year, buying into the hype that this is something we must do in a Web 2.0 world. The belief is that the traffic that comes is great for your marketing efforts. I’ve already written about my dislike for Digg and how some Diggers gang up to get sites banned in industries they don’t like. I seem to be unable to unjoin it.

“In a Web 2.0 world, if you participate in it, there are new rules that can take some getting used to. One of them is watching something you write end up being twisted and manipulated into something you never intended or even dreamed of.

“Another way of looking at it is this. You take a walk through a park and quietly enjoy it and the experience. Perhaps you will recommend it to someone else. Or, you can visit the park and leave graffiti all over the benches, paths, and toss toilet paper into the tree branches.

“This is what people are doing nowadays. The Internet continues to reflect the physical world. No one is held accountable.”

Employing these tools are a great way to communicate your message to a worldwide audience but it comes with risks that many organisations will not have encountered before such as defamation, should someone take objection to a blog post or potentially if a commenter leaves an offensive comment.

Business Communications Management can help your organisation implement an effective communications management policy and as well as create a strategy that will enhance your reputation and encourage increased sales.

For March and April, we will develop an organisational media and communications policy FREE (valued at $660 incl GST) when you hire Business Communications Management to write your organisation's newsletter for 12 months.