All Agog About Blogs - A Look At One Of The Internet's Most Effective Communication Tools

You take pictures, you write stories and opinions, you make videos, you link to cool stuff all the time.

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Weblogs or Blogs are interactive dynamic communication tools, in the online world. Whatever a blogger posts is published instantly. Blogs can be updated whenever you want and as often as you want. Blogs are distinct from other types of online writing in that they follow an informal style in their expression. Anyone can keep a blog. Earlier, blogs were not taken very seriously and were considered of not much use, but now they are a force to reckon with, considering the different ways in which they are being used. Blogging Tips. Even US Presidential Candidates are using blogs to communicate in their campaign strategy. Anyone can maintain a blog.

Purposes Of Blogging

In the blogosphere or the blogging world, there are different kinds of bloggers - personal, business, organizational and one step ahead - professional blogger.

Personal blogs are like journals or diaries. It could be focused on a topic that the blogger is interested in or just record whatever the blogger feels about, like a personal diary. The aim of organizational blogging is internal communication within the institution. Colleges may maintain a blog to talk to their students; companies may talk to their employees and customers. The unique thing here is that uniformity of message is maintained, with no scope for misinterpretation. Professional bloggers do it for money. Blogging is a lucrative career and many organizations hire bloggers to write for them. These people bring in fresh ideas. They also maintain blogs about a particular industry when hired by a network.

Business Blogs - Effective PR

Business blogs are informal and useful for connecting with customers. The main advantage is that it is easy to maintain and it gives the company a chance to be in regular touch with its staff as well as customers. It's an ideal way to reach information about product promotions, accomplishments and new systems. Many successful blogs hardly use any advertising. Instead they include relevant comments and information that its readers can use.

These days, practically every company of repute has a blog incorporated into its website. And these companies also motivate their employees to blog, promoting freedom of expression. A company can market itself through its blog in several ways. Some of them are:

- Blogs humanize a company, and this enhances its image on its website.

- Company values and opinions can be expressed through blogs. This brings in a regular set of readers who can directly respond on the site.

- Also, if the company's blog is picked up by, say Google, it gets wide publicity. Blogs are permanent so even if you go deleting a post, they will be archived somewhere. So companies usually ensure that proper guidelines are given to employees so that they are careful about what they post.

- It is easy to get competition information by browsing other companies' blogs.

- Blogs have ever-changing content. And since readers are aware of this, they enjoy visiting the blog frequently to keep up to date with what's going on.

When Employees Blog

As mentioned earlier, companies allow their employees to blog. But they must be careful about revealing company information that could be confidential or copyrighted. In an informal environment it is very easy to be expressive. The Pew Internet & American Life Project conducted two surveys in November 2004, and this study shows that even in 2004, at least 12 % of Internet users posted comments on blogs. Which means that with the traffic flowing to the website, bloggers must exercise caution about what they want to say.

Information Exchange

With the evolution of blogging as a serious form of publicity, audio and video blogging have also become popular, with technological advances.
Blogging has swept the online marketing world by storm. Companies in the PR business are using blogging for their clients.