The Growing Power of Blogs

A year ago many people weren’t sure what a blog was. Now according to the State of the Blogsphere, it appears many people have their own blog—or at least attempted one. Technorati is currently tracking 50 million blogs and that number is doubling every 200 days. This has led some to ask when this hyper growth will flatten out. However, for now it appears blogs have caught the attention of the public, and that means it has piqued the interest of more advertisers and communication strategists.

Ford just purchased advertising on over 400 blogs (via Micro Persuasion). This is a prime example of a big Fortune 500 company utilizing the Web in a bold way and should help blogs go mainstream in the marketing toolkit. A Forrester study (story here) reveals that 49 percent of interactive marketers have no intention of using blogs for their marketing efforts in the next year. What is more impressive is that 51 percent do intend to use blogs. That is up from 12 percent last year. How quickly things change!

Political strategists have realized the power of blogs, too. Witness the recent primary defeat of Senator Joe Lieberman. A Time’s story attributes much of the reason for his defeat to a strong netroots liberal blogger movement. Some of these blogs such as DailyKos, Talking Points Memo and Democratic Underground garner huge audiences. It isn’t only the posted articles that create a powerful message. All these blogs accept ads and that interactive advertising space can run into the thousands of dollars.

The blogging community started a few years ago with a small phalanx of dedicated people, who understood, believed and paved the way. What they began can now be seen rapidly evolving into one of the more powerful communication and marketing tools of our time.