The first ever, Southeastern US, Internet Summit was held in Chapel Hill on November 19th. Most of its sessions were focused on social media. One panel with the famous Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim fame, confirmed that businesses do need to be blogging – the kind of blog, who writes it, who it is focused on, what it is trying to achieve all needs to be thought out, because one blog does not fit all. But blogging is definitely a very important communications medium between a company / business and the world.
Blog Catalog, one of the most active social networks for blogs, has this to say in a 10/26/08 post:
Blogging has quickly migrated from being perceived as a forum for personal rants and raves to being a strategy-leading vehicle for communication between companies and their customers. Blogs are now the places to go to get fresh, un-”spun” information about industry trends, new technologies, and cutting-edge implementations. And blogs are the place to engage in genuine dialog about customer needs and expectations, company capabilities and responses to problems, and the technological capacities and decision-making that will shape society’s future.
Blogs are no longer the space for “personal rants;” they have become a legitimate and very important vehicle for communications: for “Fresh, un-’spun’ information,” and for “genuine dialog about customer needs and expectations.”
Another November post from the Digital Operative blog, experts in digital marketing shows a Forrester chart about what 223 marketing firms (out of 333) said about which new technologies they would be using:
“The interesting thing is that 52% of agencies still aren’t using blogs as a channel. Are you kidding me? That means that mobile marketing and game marketing still have about 1-2 years to see any real penetration.”
This post shows that marketing agencies are lagging in adopting what is now an almost ‘old’ social media format, the blog. The kind of thinking that allows a lag, leads the authors to predict slow adoption of even newer social media like mobile marketing and game marketing.
While the post focused on aggregate numbers of % of marketing companies both not using now but planning to, and not planning to use, I find it helpful to see the breakout, so I present that below.
Planning to use, but not using:
Podcasts 28%
Blogging 31%
Social Networks 36%
User Generated Content 32%
Widgets 34%
Mobile Marketing 36%
Game Marketing 15%
Not planning to use:
Podcasts 24%
Blogging 21%
Social Networks 23%
User Generated Content 28%
Widgets 37%
Mobile Marketing 36%
Game Marketing 67%
Lessons for us, you can’t afford to ignore new technologies, and blogging, which is now almost old technology is one form of communications that your company needs to be doing to be in the conversation.
