Business blogs

Build your community of online users

Goals:

• Develop your online visibility
• Develop your customer relationship
• Create a community of users

The concept

Since 2005, a new form of website has appeared massively on the internet, the blogs. Blogs are above all websites whose main characteristic is to be organized chronologically.

The phenomenon is rapidly developing and from personal notebooks, blogs are becoming more and more often real sources of professional information. Indeed, the size of the blogosphere (all blogs) doubles in one year to reach the number of 70 million blogs in the world in March 2007 (source Technorati) and the number of readers also continued to increase.

The success of these media is based on a few very specific characteristics of blogs:

• style of writing: blogs are not showcase sites, they are above all places of information updated very regularly taking into account the news and all in a more relaxed style than the institutional sites. It’s easy to relate blogging to a conversation with a set of people. Therefore the dialogue must be close to the reader, interesting and above all accessible to him.
• publication: blogs are, in their most common form, presented in an antecronological form in order to highlight the last article written, like general information sites.
• dialogue: blogs are not immune to the new trend of user generated content. All visitors of blogs can leave their comments on the articles and thus add their vision of things and create a potentially endless discussion thread.

Blogs, and more generally user-generated content, today represent a real weight in the purchasing decision and in the influence of consumers.

A 2006 IPSOS survey shows that 1/4 of Europeans trust blogs and their comments to make their choice of products or services. It is also present that 1/3 of European Internet users have not made their purchase after reading negative comments on the Internet. Services based on user-generated content are growing strongly and this trend is growing. The involvement of the Internet user and a permanent exchange with him can be decisive for the commercial strategy of a company from now on.

This growing success is explained by the simplicity of use, dissemination and participation on blogs. Indeed, blogs are easy to install for the company. They do not require great technical knowledge neither for the installation nor for updating and maintenance. The management functions are automated and the company has only a content creator mission. But the simplicity of use is also valid for the Internet user. Blogs are all based on the same principle of presentation and operation; therefore the user does not feel out of place, regardless of the blog he visits. In addition, the participation of the Internet user through comments is very simple. He only has to fill out a short form, without the obligation to create an account like on many other sites (4 fields in the majority of cases).

This ease of use makes the blog a fast system that spreads all over the web, in all sectors of activity and on all themes.

Blog solutions (which are content managers or Content Management System) have the advantage of being optimized for SEO on search engines. Therefore, blogs naturally rank highly on search engines. This variable is not negligible when we know the difficulty to appear well placed on these engines. The blog represents a gateway for your business site, it creates traffic and facilitates your visibility on the web thanks to this natural optimization for the position.

Source: 7 stratégies e-marketing illustrées, within the framework of the Etoile Project, a European INTERREG 3A project financing with the support of the ERDF. License CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 FR. Independent translation and adaptation by Nicolae Sfetcu