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I read an article in yesterday’s FT about the  “the web wins in White House race” and this fuels my belief that Blogs are becoming accepted in the mainstream. My recent new pitch meetings also suggest that businesses too are coming to a point where they accept Blogs as a useful marketing tool… or do they… really?

Not so much when the concept is fully explained and the cat is let out of the bag.

The thing I think, with Blogs and business, comes when you talk about the possibility that someone may reply or comment on something you have said. Also, how open you need to be - letting go of control a bit. Maybe even sharing some knowledge from your business?

Too often, Blogs will be implemented and treated purely as news channels with filtered news stories in a monologue fashion. If it’s news, call it news. People won’t mind. Only call it a Blog if you are ready to enter into dialogue with people.

People may comment, they may disagree, but that’s the point. If someone is negative about any of my posts, as long as it it’s not spammy, or plain rude, I’ll keep it in, why not? I many learn something. The thing is, this type of conversation could be going on without you on someone else’s Blog, or in a Forum somewhere.

So, if you are going to be brave and have a Business Blog, I would suggest that it should be as inclusive as possible.

Great article by Galen DeYoung on SearchEngineLand - B2B Blogging: Using Thought Leadership To Drive Positioning & Sales.

It really pushes home the ground swell of opinion online towards effective business communication and compounds many ideas we try to push at The Escape. Well worth reading:

When done right, blogging can give B2B thought leaders great visibility in the search engine results. That, together with their general reputations, often gets thought leaders considered by potential purchasers very early in the purchase process, often at the beginning.

Our Blog was born in October 2005 and now has over 800 pages of posts. “So what” I hear you say.

Well a couple of weeks ago (and this is a point in itself) we changed the buttons that appear at the bottom of each post to make them show just the icon. You may have thought that this would not have a massive impact, but since that change, we have had four separate posts “stumbled”.

Here is where the first point kicks in:

• Stumbled on 26th Jan - Javascript post from 24th January 2008
• Stumbled on 26th Jan - Business Card design post from 13th June 2007
• Stumbled on 27th Jan - Reducing Website Friction post from 14th June 2007
• Stumbled on 3rd Feb - Three Ways to Get More From Your Printer post from 8th August 2007

Three of these articles are over six months old. It’s basically a seeding technique; creating assets that sit on the web, gaining authority over time.

Another thing worth noting is the close proximity between the second and third ’stumbles’, which indicates to me that someone saw the Business Card article, clicked to see the next post and thought that was worth stumbling too, perpetuating the effect.

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So brands, or their agencies, are using Bloggers to talk about them. For instance, Gary, one of our developers, is trialing some photography products through his Photography Blog.

It’s a good tactic when the Blogger has authority and the message is spot on.

But, I wonder how effective some of the newer agencies are and how targetted their approach is, or, as I suspect, are they just approaching and old Blogger?

I had my first approach this week on my personal Blog about Small Business Web Marketing and got quite excited. Me, be offered something - a freebie!

But, it was a pair of Skype phones from 3. Why would I want to talk about those on my blog, it’s off topic.

I could sell out and accept the freebie, which they wanted back by the way, or I could focus on my Blog, and my audience, which importantly, is not their for new phone reviews.

Read Write Web reports that the world’s second largest stock photo firm, Corbis, will soon begin giving away free some of its high quality stock photographs to bloggers via a partnership with newly launched site PicApp.

But, do you want to show images with ads?

E-Consultancy had an article about a recent study by Reevoo for YouGov about shopping online habits.

The basis of the reports states that comments and product reviews by consumers do sway new buyers but questions the accuracy of the reviews and calls for a more regulated system.

Third party endorsements are powerful way of selling and the larger retails can afford to offer consumer opinion on products, because they can switch suppliers and are not reliant on a small product range.

This is an ongoing theme on the web at the moment - Answerability. Too many people are doing to many things on line with a view to staying anonymous, with extreme cases of bad blog comments, and Cyber bullying through Facebook.

The questions is as with all media. How independent can any comment actually be?

We have really gone hell for leather with Wordpress since we started using it back in March and as well as for Blogs, it is proving to be very useful for companies needing a cost-effective news section to their website.

A recent one we have produced is is for local company Brackenwood Windows, with a news section for easy updating by their PR Agency.

Because most of the sites we build are in ASP and Wordpress is PHP based, we are using sub domains more effectively for this. ie. news.brackenwood.com. As you can see on the site it works seemlessly to the user.

The only additional cost is for some wordpress hosting, which is working out fairly inexpensive - about £75 for a year- and because of our CSS built site, it was relatively straight forward to copy the design across.

The beauty about using your domain (and sub domains) for producing news is that the news stays as a page of content for ever (or for as long as you want it) building up page rank, authority and relevance. Plus, the search engines love a website that updates regularly.

For your customers, it also offers another way to stay up-to-date, with RSS feed subscription, where they stay in control of the customer/marketer relationship.

Looks like our old buddy Typepad is being left behind.

Blogging is an interesting marketing activity (even now) that many people still can’t understand in terms of business. Mark White asks what makes a successful corporate blog and outlines some objectives I automatically saw as possibilities that are worth sharing in the different context:

• Increased enquiries generated through the blog using specific email addresses or forms
• Incremental sales which can be tracked back to the blog
• Sign ups either to your newsletter, white papers or other sources of information
• RSS subscribers to the blog or individual categories within the blog if the level of content warrants it
• Inbound links generated by the blog when others reference and link through to the content
• Better Search Engine positioning because of the blog’s regularly updated content, internal structure and inbound links
• New products identified and developed through the market research or product development carried out on the blog
• Customer queries answered leading to reduced customer service or technical support calls

He has other advice in terms of pointers for blog but I will leave you with one thought for the doubters who may be asking, “why would anyone be interested in me?”.

Firstly, if you don’t network, like I wasn’t networking, it may not happen, but think of Facebook (if you know it). Then, think of how voyeuristic it is and how much you read others peoples stuff… then read the people who they link to… or is it just me? I think not.

Blog Statistics in The UK

Matt Ambrose also tuned me into a survey from Inferno PR with some interesting corporate blog related stuff:

50% of the companies surveyed had undertaken blogging in some form and of those nearly 90% said it had generated new business…

Other findings included:

• 64% of UK corporate blogs have been launched in the last 6 months
• 66% of managers in the survey have visited blogs in the last 12 months
• 80% of blog users visit blogs during working hours
• 33% of blog visitors will access a blog on a daily basis
• Amongst purchase decision makers, blogs were second best source for influencing buying decisions, after industry reports

Yes, I can get away with it, but maybe you can’t.

According to this BBC Article, 39% of bloggers could face the sack for gross misconduct by posting derogatory or damaging details about their workplace, boss or colleagues on their personal blogs.