Sally Falkow reports in Blogs are Better Business Drivers Than Social Networking Sites that a recent study "Harnessing the Power of Blogs," (sponsored research by BuzzLogic and conducted by JupiterResearch, a Forrester Research company) found that blogs can have more impact on purchase decisions than social networks. The study went on to conclude that while social networks help people connect, but blogs create a conversation and become a trusted resource that influences purchase decisions. They also said that blog readership has jumped 300 percent in the last four years.
This is consistent with the recent Gartner study that concluded, "Blogs have grown from a novelty to a mainstream platform for content distribution. Therefore, it is time to align IT and business forces to develop a blogging strategy for corporate and public-facing opportunities. Enterprises must define clear strategic objectives for blogging, and support them with policies to encourage executives and employees to maintain regular entries and to identify and discourage harmful blogging practices... Increasingly, any public-facing media company or enterprise must have a blogging strategy."
All of this is welcome news to business bloggers and confirms what I have been seeing informally in conversations with my clients and others. A blog allows you to go beyond the sound bytes in Twitter and Facebook status fields. They allow for the development of a complete thought and then the ongoing elaboration of that thought through subsequent posts. Comments are also not limited in their length and allow for the exchange of ideas, moving beyond simply being pointers to more comprehensive content. They become destinations in their own right. At the same time Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn status can be useful pointers to your blog content and others. I often find useful links to blogs through both Twitter and Facebook. These tools complement each other when used in manner that is consistent with their features.
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