It's amazing how Blogs have broken into the mainstream. It has become a key way that people both consume and distribute information on the Internet. This has released a wave of a whole new form of 'news' that actually competes with the high dollar corporate media that prevails on the television and radio. The Internet has broken the monopoly and brought a truer form of the 'freedom of speech' than ever before.
As one circles the net, you can now be apart of a wave of news and information like no other time in history. Clearly, this news is not always accurate and is riddled with opinion and supposition that you would hopefully not get from the mainstream media. It is from real people expressing their feelings, philosophy, and ideals. It is from people who are sometimes not in 'free' countries that have found a way to express themselves that is unstoppable and global in origin. The power of the Blog has come home in a big way.
In our small pool of people in the Flagstaff and Northern Arizona region, we tend to encourage our clients to consider a Blog as a means to get the word out regularly about what they are doing in both their personal lives and especially in their businesses. We regularly setup Blogs for our clients, customize them to look like their websites, and help them understand the uses of it. Most use only half of the functions of a Blog by posting articles and newsletters, and not allowing others to 'comment' back (much like our own Blog that this is written on). While a few have taken the leap to allowing back and forth communication with the world. In either case, it has shown to be a great way to 'get the word out' about what they are doing.
We have also recently begun using Blogs as a 'distribution source' for lots of the other media out there as well. We have found that an article written on a Blog can hit many resources at once.
The first way to do this is through 'feeds' where the Blogs are pushed into a webpage using a service like FeedBurner or WidgetBox. Click here as an example of our Flagstaff News section on our city guide that uses this function. Most of our clients that have a Blog, also feed that information into their websites. By doing this they not only have additional and interactive information on their websites, but also have created two methods of being listed in the Search Engines (both the Blog itself and the page on their sites are searchable).
Even more recently is the function of feeding a Blog into different Social Media accounts. The latest wave on the Internet is Social Media. Often people have trouble keeping up with making real announcements on them because they are so busy. By using a Blog, you can have an article fed into FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many other sites automatically. This gives you one location to write while posting it in numerous places all at once. A very efficient means of distributing you announcements.
The format of Blog lends itself to being distributed widely. We highly recommend that you use this method to communicate with the world. It is typically a free resource that can be customized to look great and make you seem very professional. It is a true way to get the word out!
