Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

Photo: Natalie Boog

When a lot of people still write saying that they don't understand the power of blogging and its relationship to a business, here's a great case study from Dolly magazine editor Bronwyn McCahon.

She mentions that when she started her blog in March of last year, she really had no idea of what a blog was, but now she rarely will even include anything in the magazine without first consulting with her blogs 250,000 readers.

Here's how she says it:

"The blog has allowed that relationship to be cultivated and built between myself and my readership, I could be talking about trivial or important things but it's that direct relationship that means I can see their fears and emotions, what they care about, what's hot and what's not, and I can roll that out in the magazine. If they think they have a voice and are being heard, that I'm taking it on board and they're taking control of the product, they're less likely to stray to our competitor."

Her comments in the above paragraph not only reveals the strengths of blogs, but the whole new era that the Internet has gone into. You have a strong relationship between her and her readers, a social network, consumers being empowered, users giving invaluable data that can be used to serve them and direct input into what they want the business to offer.

What's particularly amazing to be me about this is that I read everywhere on how marketers are searching and trying to figure out how to handle all the changes in the consumer. Well, here's the answer!