Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business

Chapter 13. The Blog Strategy (Everybody’s Talking at Me)

By the time you read this, the blogosphere will have maxxed out at 100 million blogs. That’s right, 100 million blogs—some personal, some professional, all adding their voices to the social web.

From a marketing perspective, a blog can be an excellent tool to build awareness of your company, product, or brand; build trust and strengthen relationships with customers, prospects, employees, and others who are interested or influential; and create a sense of community around the people who are important to your brand’s success. So what’s your strategy for marketing in the great big blogosphere?

Back in Chapter 10, I suggested sending important bloggers free products or tipping them off to special deals. If this sounds like a nobrainer, pay close attention to the story of Oh! Gizmo (ohgizmo.com). David Ponce is the owner and managing editor of this blog about “gadgets, innovation, and design,” where he, senior editor Andrew Liszewski, and their readers blog about the gadgets.

In a “Disclosures” section of the site, Ponce clearly states that he and his colleagues are allowed to keep any products sent to them for review purposes. He also emphasizes that they take “great care to maintain our impartiality and will never, for any reason, give a product a positive review when we feel it is undeserved.”

Now here’s where things get interesting. During an interview, Ponce told a SmartMoney magazine writer that a $600 Nokia N91 phone is “great ...