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The Corporate blog has emerged as one of the most effective communications platforms for businesses of all kinds to bypass the traditional media gatekeepers to tell unique and compelling stories directly to the market, according to online thought leadership strategist and viral marketing expert David Meerman Scott.
"Blogs also allow you to take online thought leadership content in different directions that will appeal to specific target markets without negatively impacting the strategy and content of your primary Web site," Scott says. "As a way to experiment, to test new ideas, or to reach narrow niche markets, smart marketers use highly focused blogs. If your experiment fails, you can simply shut down the blog with little or no negative effect on your main site." Scott, the author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing & online media to reach your buyers directly, says another benefit is that the cost of blogging is lower than that of other marketing media. "Blogs make telling your company's story easy and authentic," he says. "Companies large and small as well as nonprofits and independent professionals appreciate the rapid set-up and easy-to-use features of blogs to reach both external and internal constituents." However, Scott says that blogging has gotten a bad rap and has a negative connotation as a tool for business. "Elements of big media get their collective knickers in a twist because they insist on comparing blogs to traditional media," Scott says. "When journalists write stories about business blogging they tend to focus on the negative. We hear stories about an employee getting fired for having a blog. Or we have weird articles about blogs compared to newspapers. Guess what? Blogs and traditional media are different! It is not one vs. another: Blogs and big media can and should coexist." Scott says an area to watch is the use of blogs in marketing and customer service applications. Imagine a regularly updating forum for active users of software products to share information. Of course, thousands of discussion forums on the Web already exist, but almost all are independent of the companies and products that are written about, he says. Scott's book "The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing & online media to reach your buyers directly" features a foreword by Robert Scoble, Vice President Media Development at PodTech.net, co-author of Naked Conversations, and one of the world's most popular bloggers at Scobleizer.com. The book will be released in June 2007 and is available for pre-orders wherever business books are sold. ISBN: 0-470-11345-6 David Meerman Scott is an online thought leadership strategist and viral marketing expert. The programs he has developed have won numerous awards and are responsible for selling over one billion dollars in products and services worldwide. Scott has been named to MarketingSherpa's Viral Marketing Hall of Fame two years in a row. He is also an instructor for Pragmatic Marketing and he has lived and worked in New York, Tokyo, Boston, and Hong Kong and has presented at industry conferences and events in over twenty countries on four continents.
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