by Krista Davis
* Winner! Winner of Krista's new book, The Diva Runs Out of Thyme is Pat G. Pat, send me your mailing address (darlene at darleneryan.com) and we'll get it in the mail to you. Thanks for visiting, Krista.)
Krista Davis is the author of The Diva Runs out of Thyme, the first in a new series, available this coming Tuesday.
I confess that I have been remarkably slow to come to blogging. Websites make sense to me. Websites are like store windows, except the wind isn’t blowing snow in my face and my legs aren’t exhausted from running all over town.
But blogs. Oof. Posting every day. I had visions of spending more time on the blog than on my next book. However, I recently listened to a lecture by attorney Richard Levick that gave me pause and forced me to reconsider my thoughts about blogging.
The lecture was actually about crisis management in big companies but he emphasized blogging in a way that I hadn’t considered. He pointed out that the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal was driven by a blogger. Indeed, we all know the name Matt Drudge now. News organizations hounded his
blog for updates on the Lewinsky matter. It wasn’t a bigwig reporter who kept that story going -- it was a blogger. And that changed our world in more ways than one. Today, television news networks haunt the blogosphere, looking for news. Bloggers are actually a source of news!
Big multinational corporations are beginning to blog and sell themselves through social networking. Blogging has become such a powerful marketing tool that even the big guys are jumping on board. Did you know that publishers send boxes of books to influential bloggers? Did you know that there are perfume blogs and that some perfume companies, unnerved by the influence of perfume blogs, are beginning to invite bloggers to press events?
The number of people reading blogs is staggering. There are several interesting surveys, with all sorts of stats, but the bottom line is that blog readers number in the millions. What that means to us is that for once, we don’t have to pay for marketing. We can do the same things that big companies are doing. There is no ridiculously unaffordable fee and anyone can play -- the internet is fast becoming the great equalizer. Of course the field is crowded with blogs, but
standing out from the pack is another topic.
Elisa Camahort Page, cofounder of BlogHer, likens the blogosphere to the
kitchen table, where we can sit down and converse about the things that matter to us. I love that analogy. How many times did you type a couple of keywords into a search engine yesterday? So did millions of other people. Millions.A blog is an opportunity to reach out to consumers in a manner that’s shaking up corporate marketing. Even if a person hits on your blog only once, that’s one more bit of exposure for your book.
Corporate America has realized that the future of marketing lies in the internet and more specifically in the blogosphere. If you’ve been balking about blogging, it might be time to make use of this tool -- it’s free and it’s right at your fingertips.
(Ask a question, share your blogging experiences, or just say "Hello" in comments and you could win a copy of The Diva Runs Out of Thyme. Check back Sunday night to see if you've won.)