Blogs as PR

Big Businesses seem to have taken into Blogging big time as a PR exercise, on the lines of scobleizer.com, that is.

Once dismissed as a forum for pedantic, pyjama-clad insomniacs, the blogosphere is now smashing down the barriers to information and achieving parity with the big guns of old media. At least, PR companies certainly think so. Bloggers have become a powerful conduit for stealthy, word-of-mouth marketing that can make or break the image of a company.

Microsoft stumbled on this a few years ago when one of its workers started blogging about himself. Robert Scoble, employed as a technical evangelist, has been credited with making Microsoft appear less the evil, corporate bully and more the community-minded good guy. Scoble's honest, self-deprecating scobleizer.com has turned him into a cyber celebrity, and achieved what years of expensive PR failed to do: helped to humanise Microsoft. [ Link ]