Hello Comm 296!!!
I am super excited about this class and about learning the basics of marketing. This first post about blogging especially excited me since I have just began marketing for a business still in its infant stages (check us out at http://www.amazingdecorgifts.com), and am very eager to know how I could implement blogging in our website. I ended up stumbling upon David Mercer’s ”Blogging is Marketing” (http://technorati.com/business/small-business/article/blogging-is-marketing/), and as I clicked through some of the links provided, I began to realize just how VAST the business blogging resource pile out there actually is!!!
After spending most of my morning reading through blogs like http://www.copyblogger.com/and http://www.problogger.net/ and bookmarking a gazillion links, I was ready to take the world with social blogging. But then I had to take step back and wonder, “With all this new hype around business blogs, how many business blogs do I PERSONALLY subscribe to and visit on a weekly basis?”
It occurred to me that just because you have a business blog and are able to write some amazing content, it doesn’t mean you will automatically have a great following. If this were so, every blogging business should have a million followers, and blogging should be the highlight of every university textbook in the world! After thinking over it over, I came to the conclusion that although blogging is definitely an amazing and powerful marketing tool, it is still just a tool, and its potential can only be fully utilized when the developer knows how to effectively use it and market it to potential customers. And how can a developer know how to use the tool? It comes back down to the marketing fundamentals I am beginning to learn in class! I am now challenged to dig deeper in my understanding of the concepts I’m learning in class, so that in the future, as I continue to pursue a career in marketing, I can better make use of social media and blogs for marketing, as well as any new marketing media that may appear in the future.