Are blogs relevant to b-2-b?

A great deal is being written about blogs. Company CEOs and politicians are said to write them. Individuals record their mundane daily activities, journalists break news using them, but very few of them ever get read! There is a lot written about the idea of blogs and the rapid growth in the number of blogs in existence – but is this just another idea with more puff than real value? A recent survey published by eMarketer quoting an American Advertising Federation report rated various new media for effectiveness putting blogs at a mere 13% just ahead of RSS with 8%. Leading the list was search at 49% followed by online video 34%, Social networking 30%, podcasts 21%, video games 20% and mobiles 15%. A veritable raft of new media communication opportunities and a lot of food for thought. Will there be winners and losers? Will they all develop to oust traditional media? Who knows? Back to blogs. According to Technorati the 50 millionth was tracked back in July 2006, the blogosphere is doubling every 6 and a half months, 175,000 new blogs are added each day, there are 1.6 million postings a day …. so not something to be ignored then. Except this nagging concern about effectiveness – well I guess if nobody reads most of them this is not surprising. Another part of the eMarketer article concluded that awareness of blogs really depended on links from other blogs – 63% and 22.9% by recommendation. Only 19.6% were via search engines so optimising content is going to be less effective than getting some well known bloggers to link to your blog. More about word of mouth marketing than conventional promotion. So where does this leave blogs in the technical marketing plan? Perhaps we are the frontier of a new communication media revolution …. Perhaps.