BillHobbs.com is a frequently updated blog of original reporting and commentary by Bill Hobbs, a longtime Nashville journalist and media relations adviser. I am currently serving as communications director for the Tennessee Republican Party, a job I began on Oct. 29, 2007.
This Reuters report says that, in Europe, "blogs are becoming a force to be reckoned with as a means of advertising products" according to a survey by Ipsos MORI . The Ipsos MORI poll "found that the Internet journals are a more trusted source of information than TV advertising or e-mail marketing," reports Reuters.
Ipsos MORI found a direct link between blogs, or user-generated content, and people's intentions to buy goods or services. Any company that fails to come up to standard should beware. The blog is replacing word of mouth for endorsing or condemning a product or service.
About a third of those Europeans questioned said they had been put off making a purchase after reading negative comments on the Internet from customers or other web-users, while 52 percent said they had been persuaded to buy after a positive review on a blog.
Get it right, and blogs could be a boost to companies and even save on their advertising and marketing budgets.
Considering that people are starting new blogs at a rate of 3 million per month - that's 300,000 new blogs every day - it's crystal clear that no company can afford not to have a well-thought-out presence in the blogosphere.
ABC News technology columnist Michael S. Malone explores the ongoing and explosive expansion of the blogosphere in his latest column and predicts the blogosphere will eventually reach 1 billion blogs.
The data are so stunning that even the people at Technorati seem a little dazed. Put simply, the growth of the blogosphere since March 2001 is the upward trajectory of a sine wave, from zero "weblogs" then to 57 million blogs today. And the number continues to grow by 3 million blogs per month, or 100,000 per day.
Think about that: Every single day, 100,000 people out there in the world download the proper software and begin keeping a record of their lives, spouting their opinions, posting photographs of their pets, listing their favorite new movie or book or song, telling their secret dreams and fears, publishing their poetry, writing paeans to their heroes, memorializing lost parents and friends, and on and on.
A total of 1.3 million posts per day.
Here's the data Malone cites from Technorati. Malone compares the continued expansion of the blogosphere with the rapid decline of newspapers.
couple years ago, about the time the big-name bloggers were impacting the presidential elections, everyone was talking about how blogs were about to be the Next Big Thing, and how they, along with online news services and aggregator sites, would spell the death knell for traditional mainstream media.
It sounded good, and the scenario was easy to extrapolate, but it was still almost impossible to imagine that it would be true by the time the next election cycle came around.
And yet, here we are. And it has happened. Basically, every major newspaper in the industrial world is dying, some slowly, but most with shocking alacrity - and many have speeded up their death throes by abandoning all pretenses of objectivity and hanging on to their core readership by reading back to them their own prejudices.
Television news is dying, too. Why else would CBS News throw the Hail Mary Pass of putting Katie Couric in the Walter Cronkite seat? And with no one out there to make the catch, all that the most legendary of network news operations has managed to do is humiliate itself while accelerating its race to oblivion.
The result is that whether we are prepared for it or not, the Web is now our primary medium not just for obtaining, but for creating, news and opinion. ... And its presence literally grows by the day. And you don't have to be a mathematician to appreciate that this presence is going to grow geometrically in the years ahead. Picture 1 billion bloggers by the end of this decade.
A billion blogs - even 10 percent of that - is world-changing stuff for business, for public relations, marketing, media and advertising.
Is your company, your church, your non-profit, your university, your business, your elected officials or your government ready for that?
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