Blogs and advertising

This is sort of a corollary to the previous post, but doesn't appear there in an 'update' section because it, uh, isn't really an update. There I discussed the issue of treating bloggers as if they were journalists, in a more traditional sort of PR fashion, but companies have the ability to exert even more control over blog content by encouraging employees to start and maintain them in a practice Rick Bruner calls 'adverblogging.' When Rick first posted about this a couple years ago, he had only one example to support his newly-named "trend": a blog run by a Macromedia employee that contained news and information about a newly-launched product. Even now I can only contribute one more off the top of my head: Google's new blog. The Macromedia blog ended up being a great source of customer support information in addition to PR and advertising, and the Google blog began the day after the company-owned Blogger was relaunched to aid in supporting it...that company really hasn't needed any extra help with advertising or PR though, what with the upcoming IPO. I'm sure other companies have gotten on board with this, because an unanticipated benefit to running a company blog is the free boost obtained from search engine advertising, which is one of today's hot topics. Because they're constantly being updated and have links to numerous other pages across the web, blogs tend to get much higher pageranks and will often top the lists of results when they contain relevant material (case in point: Gizmodo tops the list for the search string 'gadgets,' Chris is first for the 'Baylor 1L' search and is on the first page of results for 'Baylor Law'). Here again, blogs reside in a sort of neither-here-nor-there world, but the ones who figure it out will undoubtedly be rewarded for their trouble.