The reality is that blogging is a medium. Blogging is also a content style. Because the earliest blogs were built on the principles of an 4 Blog Marketing authentic voice, honesty, and authority, most blogs are expected to have those qualities—this holds true even more so for the corporate blog. Blog readers (even brand new ones) are so conditioned to reading a personal voice on blogs that they expect it from companies, too. This presents unique challenges for business leaders who want to understand blogging, as the concepts of transparency and authenticity are not often associated with corporate communications practices.

Because they’re publicly available on the Internet, blogs are wide open, ready to interact with all of your customers. Blogs let customers hear what is on your mind, and they create a space for customers to tell you exactly what they are thinking about. Blogs are the next best thing to going door-to-door to each of your customers’ homes or offices; they give you and your company a way to create and sustain real relationships with real people.

Past marketing efforts were always transmissions from companies—one-way communications aimed at as wide an audience as possible, such as advertisements, popup windows on the Internet, and the like. With blogs, however, you’re engaging with your customers, as every reader is reading your blog by choice, every reader is choosing to interact with your business, and every reader wants to hear more from you. This powerful new way of communicating creates and empowers customer evangelists in ways that were practically impossible before blogs existed.