Monday, September 19, 2005

Building networks with blogs

Elizabeth Albrycht has opened Global PR Blog Week 2.0 with a terrific piece on blogs as a tool for network building:

By focusing on network building, we move away from the hyperbole of BLOG and begin to think about how to use blogs pragmatically, as powerful communications tools. A prime reason blogs are such good tools for network building is that they are link-heavy, and the link is the core technology for making networks visible. I believe the visibility of a network contributes to its effectiveness because that very visibility reinforces its presence and influence to its members. ...

In the past, it was much more difficult to see your network, as connections had little sharable physical manifestation. A business card sitting in a rolodex on your desk is a far more difficult to assign value to vs. a visible link on a website or blog. One of the implications of this visibility is that it makes the results of our work more easily measurable, making our work more justifiable (always nice at budget time).


So much of marketing has to do with what is known as networking, building a series of interlocking business relationships that produce referrals. Blogs allow us to build those relations far more quickly and effectively.

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