AMA Marketing Luncheon: Questions about Blogging

Franki and I had the opportunity to go to an AMA meeting today at Maggiano's in Richmond Heights.

The speaker was Barry Gavril, of Adamson Advertising, and his topic was Learn How Blogging Can Benefit Your Marketing Efforts: The topic was a hot one, and Barry was speaking to a full house.

He approached the topic well, laying out the basics of what a weblog was, how to build one on blogger.com (he did this live) and how it could be used by marketing clients. The information on his presentation should be up soon, along with links to his source materials.

If recent information is credible, blogging is a topic that is important be aware of. In the room, though only a few people raised their hands to a question about how blogged, two-thirds of the room admitted to reading them.

Blogging4Business puts it bluntly.
Ignore Bloggers at your Peril!

According to new research by Julian Smith at Jupiter Research, bloggers, though small in number, are having “a disproportionately large influence” on society. Today’s Guardian quotes Smith as saying that a vocal minority of Web users — from my reading, it’s looks to be maybe 20 percent (and rising) — are turning to blogs, message boards, UseNet forums and the like to voice their critiques, concerns and praise for the brands and people they interact with every day. In doing so, they are shaping public opinion on news stories, company reputations and social trends.

Back to the Marketing Luncheon. I wrote down the questions that people asked, thinking it might be good to give some written answers if anyone was searching on the conference. There's also the added dynamic that these questions are great for finding out what marketers are asking when it comes to blogs.

Question 1: How do you get people to read your blog?

Question 2: Who is reading blogs?

Question 3: How do you promote your blog to a specific audience?

Question 4: How do you deal with negative comments? What do you do about censorship?

Question 5: How many posts should you write before publicizing your blog?

Question 6: What is a company's legal exposure to the blog?

Question 7: What is the difference between a blog and a message board?

Question 8: What steps do you take before you launch a blog?

There you go folks, real live questions from real live marketing people. They're curious about blogs, and they need to know more. We've been blogging for over four years, and in this business, that makes us experts. Over the next week or so, I'll answer each of these questions and put them into posts, eventually turning them into white papers.

Some of these questions are answered on our FAQ's. In the meantime, if you were at the event and would like some more specialized answers, e-mail us at the contact page.