Blogging: Product Spin and Mindware Marketing

Journalist Ian Palmer wrote an article in IT Business Canada about businesses using blogs as an indicator of newfound respectability. IBM, HP, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems are identified as sponsoring blogs, probably a good thing, but phony? Robin Hopper, CEO of iUpload, is quoted as saying his company's high Google ranking came not from its website, but its blog.

iUpload and Mr. Hopper aside, no one looks to business for sincerity. In many ways, ethics has been to difficult to get, so sincerity is way far off. But, business can be critiqued and reviewed for its creativity and you can see that in a new wave of biz blogs.

Sun Microsystems has an employee-driven blog Sun Bloggers where staff chat, vent and pound their chests. They do talk product, but in a developer sort of way.

IBM went into the freeware blog business with developerWorks a portion of IBM.com that allows visiting user/developers to created personal blogs. IBM has this in its "community section" within IBM which features forums, blogs and user groups. Now that spells marketing with "educational" before it and that might not be so bad. Mr. Palmer does not mention Ford, but the automaker had a splendid idea re-introducing its 1960's powerhouse seller, the Mustang, with a concept-to-showroom blog with pictures and commentary from the engineers.

It will be interesting to see how far companies will push a subtle blog-as-product or product showcase strategy. It will probably be for a while. The burgeoning blog sphere reportedly contains consumer/readers journaling and viewing more than 6 million sites.***

** PubSub Concepts Inc. in New York, has said that it’s now tracking over 6.5 million blogs..."