(A blog recently published in Washington, D.C.)


So What’s a Blog Anyway?

I don’t know anything about Senator Obama’s secret service protection but I do know that the blog about him was written up as a strong example of the use of blogging.

Blogs and blogging have become a significant part of our information repertoire but many of us, like me, create them without knowing exactly what the structure and definition of a blog really is. So I did some research.

In the New York Review of Books, Sarah Boxer, author of “Ultimate Blogs; Masterworks from the Wild Web”, wrote a definitive article under the simple title, “Blogs”.

She defines a blog as follows, “A blog, for those who don’t know, is a journal or log that appears on a web site. It is written on line, read on line, and updated on line…..The word “blog” is a portmanteau term for Web log or Weblog.”

“ In 1997 Jorn Barger, the keeper of Robot Wisdom a Web site ……coined the word “Weblog”. In 1999 Peter Merholz, the author of a Weblog called Peterme, split it in two like this-“We blog”---creating a word that could serve as either noun or verb. “Blog was born.”

“Today there are, by one count, more than 100 million blogs in the world with about 15 million of them active…..There are political blogs, confessional blogs, gossip blogs, sex blogs, mommy blogs, science blogs, soldier blogs, gadget blogs, fiction blogs, video blogs, photo blogs and cartoon blogs, to name a few….”

“With such riches to choose from, you might think it would be a snap to put a bunch of blogs into a book and call it an anthology. And you would be wrong. The trouble? Links---those bits of highlighted text that you click on to be transported to another blog or another web site. (“Links are the Web equivalent of footnotes, except that they take you directly to the source….”)

“Although blogging has precedents going back to the early 1980’s, on-line news groups, on-line diaries, “We’ve Got Blog” began gathering steam about 1998.  That was when a number of people began using their web sites to record and to link to the new sites they had discovered.”

“When the blog book came, the tone of the blogosphere began to shift. A lot of the new blogs, though certainly not all of them—weren’t so much filters for the web as vents for opinion and self-revelation. Instead of figuring out ways to serve up good fresh finds many of the new bloggers were fixated on getting found. So the very significance of linking began to change….”

“Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, and free associative, infantile, sexy, petty dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter…. They are what they write and you can’t fake that.”

And so I thank Sarah Boxer for helping me define and describe blogging. But let’s go on.

What fascinates me is the function of today’s blogging. It is today’s street talk, and vox populi; casual, personal, and revealing.

So what does this mean to the marketer?

It rests in the influence that blogs, buzz, word of mouth, etc. have on consumer purchase decisions. Technology affords us a glimpse of the conversations of influencers who are shaping those consumer perceptions. The result is that we have unfettered, unadulterated access to the real thoughts customers in their own voices. Now is the time for marketers to perk up and listen to what they are saying and thinking. What we’ll hear will foster the creation of relationships between marketers, and then customers and ultimately prospects. That is, provided we take the time to hear them and have the proper analytical tools to do so quickly and effectively. This may be difficult, but we will do so because we value relevance and information.

It reminds me of something Ginger Rogers said of her dancing with Fred Astaire. She said, “I have to do everything he does, backwards and in high heels.”