Blogging: The New Trend

Blogs offer a unique channel for developing and maintaining relationships and communication between organizations and publics and allow you to put new information on the web frequently and efficiently. Corporations use blogs to connect with customers, put a face on their business, promote themselves, and therefore, customer loyalty is increased. Blogs have evolved from both online and offline modes of communication and have characteristics of both personal and professional communication. Basically, blogging is word of mouth opinions that can reach the entire world. Consumers are looking for authenticity, and blogs is where they can find that.

In my research through public relations blogs, I found credible information that suggests blogging is useful in the hotel industry. The Maine Innkeepers Association says that with a blog, there’s no waiting for someone to help with your website, and there is no need to pay money every time you want to add new information to the site. You just write as casually as you would talk to a guest. The Maine Innkeepers Association says that once a prospective customer has found your blog, they’ll see marketing messages and perhaps even links to where they can reserve a room directly from the blog. This makes it easy for the customer and gives the hotel an upper hand compared to it’s competitors. They are also allowed to see other interesting posts about activities nearby the hotel to make the customers stay even better. It gives the hotel industry the opportunity to share personal stories in their own voices. A human voice is created by making messages personal and developing relationships. This is the most cost effective way to promote the industry. Blogging has helped the industry and is proven by its statistics that 1.49 percent more rooms per day are sold in comparison to last year. The industry says that due to online technology, spending over a five year growth period of 53 billion dollars increased to 111 billion.

Owner of Marriott Hotels, Mr. Bill Marriott, says this is where the action is if you want to talk to your customers directly and believes strongly that blogs will be a huge communication tool in the 2008 presidential campaign. He says that blogging will allow the hotel to do what they’ve been doing for years, speak directly to the customers, only on a global scale and more efficient. “We are a company that is built on opportunity, and the foundation has made us successful,” says Marriott, “I believe in communicating with the customer, I’d rather engage directly in dialogue with you because that’s how we learn and grow as a company.” The hotel industry is now able to get feedback from their customers and have conversations with them about their experience.

Mr. Gratsch has strong intentions of expanding the use of RSS at Microsoft. He says before, you had to make an active attempt to visit sites to check and see if things have changed. With RSS, you don’t have to actively pursue that information, it’s delivered to you if changes have been made. Forrester’s Young said that RSS enablement is becoming popular for mainstream applications. For example, Spanning Partners’ Spanning Salesforce is a tool that lets Salesforce.com send out information about new leads and contacts to salespeople by an RSS reader.

An Indian restaurant in Minnesota used blogs to rally customer support when threatened with the loss of its lease. They were able to put the truth in what happened and had the opportunity for customers and the workers to share their stories with credibility. Clip-n-Seal is a small business that used blogs to market a device for resealing bags. In their case, customers could learn about the product in a way that cost nothing for the company.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project reported that blog readership had increased by 58 percent in 2004, claiming that blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. In Fortune’s 2005 issue, it was said that blogs are changing working practices in the areas of advertising, marketing and PR. The Harvard Business Review commented that blogs are the most conversational of all the forms of media, and marketers can’t afford to be left out of this new trend.

After companies took the opportunity to use the new technology trend, they realized that blogs provide a source where managers are able discuss new products with developers and put questions to answers for their customers. I think this new type of online technology will continue to grow as companies see the positive results it has given.

Check out more on these topics by viewing these links:

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue2/kelleher.html
Maine Innkeepers Association
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2084409,00.asp
http://jeffreyhill.typepad.com/voiceblog/files/mbadissertation.pdf
http://www.blogs.marriott.com/default.asp?item=435095
www.businessblogconsulting.com
prblog.com