By Elizabeth Boineau
Marketing Matters

The center of the world has shifted. Well, the center of the World Wide Web, at least. If recent stats are considered to be both real and lasting, then the Web may be at the center of the entire universe in terms of marketing relevance by today’s standards.

It’s sometimes called consumer-generated media, sometimes social media. It often takes the form of a blog and it’s now so pervasive as to be known as Web 2.0. It’s the “second coming” that’s all about “empowering individual consumers,” according to Time’s 2006 year-end issue.

As one who was prone to say blah blah blog to this new media platform, it was time for me to take a trip inside this communications channel taking the world (and the Web) by storm.

So just what is a blog? It’s one form, in addition to personal videos (think: YouTube) and social networking (MySpace.com, for example), of personal expression on the Internet.

The word itself is a shortened form of Web log, and it’s like an online diary or regularly updated journal that can take different forms, but is typically easy to construct and maintain. They are most often text with few graphics and require no tech skills to set up or maintain.

Frequent entries are essential to keeping a blog alive and these may reflect on current topics, issues, books, movies, products, services and so on.

They are also often used for internal updates and knowledge training, where employees can go to pull down the latest data and info from a current, updated source they might not otherwise have. Not that they have taken over for intranets yet but, in a way, they seem more chic and are often far less expensive.

Whether entries from the HR person to the newest batch of ever-ready employees or from the vice president of sales, whipping up the sales team for the next trade show, they serve a purpose. Maybe it’s an online journal from the CEO, trying to build the culture of an organization, or one with more external focus such as book blogs, movie blogs, sports blogs or weather blogs. Either way, somebody is listening, and perhaps far more closely than we thought.

So we know that driving buzz is the name of the game in Hollywood. Now we learn that blogs have been so successful in creating buzz that some movie studios have been relying on them to outpace movie critics. These blog sites allow fans exclusive previews, interviews with the stars and a general feeling of being part of the “in” group. If the blog is successful, it can create such a strong Internet buzz that an unfavorable critical review won’t be able to dent it.

The ad industry often monitors, and sometimes spawns, the blog buzz to see which shows are likely to succeed in a television network’s new seasonal lineup. That valuable insight guides them regarding where to place media dollars for large national advertisers who pay them to deliver a relevant target audience.

That is all the more important with today’s high cost of prime-time media—a 30-second spot during the 2007 Super Bowl is going for $2.5 to $2.6 million—when other media platforms and marketing channels serve to distract from TV. Once, alongside your local newspaper, television was the primary way we got news and information; it added to our lives in innumerable ways. Now the Internet fills many of those daily needs.

How about the most basic commercial blog, whereby Amazon allows consumers to post their own product reviews and rate products? This word-of-mouth advertising leads to the coveted third-party endorsement, which is one of the most powerful, or harmful if the product is not well received, things in marketing. You may have read my take on word-of-mouth advertising in past columns. In short, it’s a good thing.

Those persuasive words are ever-more prolific. Some 44% of U.S. internet users post on blogs, subscribe to discussion boards or engage in other social media outlets, according to The Pew Internet and American Life Project.

So jump in and join the crowd. Soon you too can be recorded, expressed, posted and noted, forever and in perpetuity, in well-connected logs and blogs of life as we know it, through the wild and wonderful World Wide Web.

Elizabeth L. Boineau runs E. Boineau & Company, a strategic marketing communications and public relations firm based in Charleston. You may reach her at eboineau@eboineauandco.com.

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