Can I commend you to read Beyond Blogs in Businessweek (2nd June 08 print edition). It is a review of how things have changed since the original Businessweek story in May 2005 - Blogs will change your business.
I've featured articles around the theme "The importance of blogs" for the whole of the last three years too - first in Ovum Holway's HotNews and now in Holway's HotViews. Despite this and the overwhelming supporting evidence, I still don't think that the majority of CEOs in our sector 'get it'. Blogs now drive the tech news agenda (they are a bit like the Radio 4 Today programme which drives the political agenda for the day). Blogs are trawled by all the main media types - newspapers in particular - for news and comment. For example, almost every new turn of the the current Yahoo/Microsoft/AOL/News Corp story has its origins in blog reports. I find myself quoted in many journals etc around the world without talking to any of them. Scary!
But, most importantly, today's leading bloggers are now the tech sector's leading influencers.
Businessweek now adopts the term Social Media to cover not just blogs but the whole way in which the corporate world now interacts internally and externally. It encompasses Youtube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Facebook/Myspace/Linkedin, podcasting, iPlayer - even iTunes.
Businessweek (or rather the people it asked in producing the article) reckoned that the 'blog bubble" was unlikely to pop. However, I do see much of the $billions invested in new Social Media companies going the way of the dot.coms. It is devilishly hard to 'monetize' social media. Also, as Businessweek shows, yesterday's hit blog is often gone by tomorrow. Few have real staying power. Some have consolidated into megablogs which are actually starting to look as unexciting as the old media they sought to oust.
Anyway, if you still doubt that, corporately, you can ignore the bloggers - if the latest Businessweek article doesn't convince you, nothing will.
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