eMarketing

Within the last few years, blogs have become an important web 2.0 (marketing) tool for companies, professionals and private persons the like. Blogs give everyone with an internet access the posibility to spread his/her thoughts, ideas and believes. Given that there is an audience for the messages, blogs can be powerful tools that can even contribute to the  overthrowing of regimes and induce political changes.

A glance at the word formation process of the term BLOG reveals that the term is a derivative of the expression”weblog”. The term “Weblog” was coined through the linguistic process of compounding (web+log) in 1997 by John Barger. Clipping reduced the term to the popular notion “blog”. This further step of word formation was performed by Peter Merholz who jokingly split the word “weblog” into “we blog” on his blog Peterme.com in 1999. The process of conversion (the change from one word class into another without morphological marking) soon extended the new verb into the word class of nouns. Suffixation (a bound morpheme is added to the stem of the word) extended “blog” into “blogger”, i.e. “a person who blogs”.

Blogs have been around for quite some time, but only in the last few years they have gained momentum and broad popularity. With the ever-increasing surge of customer interaction it is highly recommendable for companies to know their way around web 2.0 in general and blogs in specific- to know about its intricacies, leverages and dangers for their companies. Web 2.0 and blogs gives customers and privat persons suddenly a lot of power through exposure and attention. Companies that know how to handle the web 2.0 and the increased costumer interaction will not only gain through the new communication channels but also through synergies with the customers.