Financial Risk Manager

A strong online presence is important for businesses in today's high-speed and competitive world. Blogs have already become a new are a new buzz marketing. Marketers are iblogging for organizations, products, ideas and or for other organizational goals and achieving.

That has not started happening in Pakistan yet. An overwhelming majority of local consumers who do not (or cannot) use the Internet and even marketing professionals still ask what is Blog?

To understand blogging as a corporate communications tool, we must understand the nature of blogs . Here is a short definition, "Blogs - an abbreviation of 'weblogs' - are published on the web, typically as microsites standing by themselves but today also as parts of traditional web sites. They reflect the interests, thoughts and opinions of the person, sometimes persons, publishing the blog. Blogs are characterized by frequent updates, an informal tone and many links to other blogs and web sites."

A business blog is a blog published by or with the support of an organization to reach that organization's goals. In external communications the potential benefits include strengthened relationships with important target groups and the positioning of the publishing organization as industry experts. Internally blogs are generally referred to as tools for collaboration and knowledgemanagement.

Blogs can drive visitors to existing web site and help find new customers and engage the ones organizations already have. Blogs are prevailing and cost-effective marketing tools. As far as businesses is concerned, there are clients and potential clients. A blog will create a dialogue between the business, present client base, and potential buyers. Communication has never been easier and user friendly.

Once an organization has a blog, it offers immediate and high impact interaction with its target audience. As more people have online access, they'll want more than the standard online newsletter or typical PR response (we are so averse to existing PR stereotypes). Long gone are the days when companies simply fed information to their customers. Now everyone asks for a dialogue - a meaningful exchange of information. People also want to know that organizations are listening to them and paying heeds to what is being suggested, and blogs allow just that -- responding quickly and openly.

From a business point of view there are several potential reasons to blog particularly in less connected country like Pakistan. But, as always, it depends on what businesses want. Blogs are no different from channels like video, print, audio, presentations and even word of mouth marketing. They all deliver results - but of varying kind. The kind you can expect from blogs is mainly about stronger relations with important target groups.

Who should blog for the businesses? Ideally, front line people who know the business in and out should blog about it. Marketing professionals can also use this powerful tool. Organization can hire professional writers to blog for them under company's name or blog under their own. Depending upon the feedback and information provided by audience, an inside blogger can develop the ability to write in his or her own voice and create content for business blog. Outsider bloggers can view business with an objective eye and offer fresh marketing ideas and strategies.

Outsider blogger can study company's marketing materials, reports, other collateral information, and meet key people in organization to learn about what organization does and how best to market the product through blogging.

In developed world, blogging is being taught in most business school as a part of business studies and or part of mass communication courses.

Bloggers can post material written in editorial style and voice, updating at least once a day, three-to-five days a week. The content may also include company news, events, and information about new products and services relevant to your business.

Earlier, online marketing and web sites never picked up in Pakistan because of obvious "digital divide that exists due to individual disparities in levels of income, education standards, psychological reasons, age, gender, rural urban divide, and quality of life or collective deprivations like lack of physical infrastructure."

Pakistan corporate world should look at blogging as an opportunity to reach out but sadly, this has still not started to happen.

Who all should have a blog? The answer depends on who is being asked this question. Given my personal interest, I say everyone should have a blog.

For marketers, public relations professionals, writers and all those who need to reach out with their ideas and or products and services, blogs are a must; easier, cheaper, convenient. But think outside the box and you will find people have experiences to share, stories to tell and put the things on record. They all need a blog.

Other day I was suggesting to diplomat to have a blog. I remember getting a lot of publicity stuff from different embassies in my school years. Almost all embassies and consulates have publications to tell their governments’ policies and influence the public in whatever way they can. In the age when presidents of the states (Presidents of Iran and USA are known to have their own blogs), I argued that blogs should be a must for any diplomat. Anyone in foreign department listening?

Let me conclude the post on this statement; those who can’t have a blog should at least have a printing press.

By Zainub Razvi

Blogs have come a long way from their humble beginnings in 1997 when blogging pioneer Jorn Barger first began to maintain a log of his daily surfing routine. Little did he know that less than a decade later, Time magazine would honour bloggers and their contributions by naming ‘you’ as their 2006 Person of the Year.


The rise of blogs in Pakistan as an alternative new media has been slower as compared to the rest of the world, where blogging has been at the forefront pretty much ever since Google bought the Evan William’s brainchild Blogger.com in 2003. But even this slow rise to prominence is noteworthy for a country where the internet penetration and literacy levels are not something to be proud of.


To borrow from the tagline of the recently organised ‘National Bloggers Conference’ in Karachi that was hosted by the Sindh government’s IT department, blogging in Pakistan has evolved from ‘past time to prime time’. While Pakistan’s growing blogosphere continues to present a kaleidoscope of the complex and contradictory developments within the country, many of the non-bloggers outside Pakistani blogosphere still aren’t completely sure of what blogs are anyway.


Casual discussions with many students reveal, for instance, that while they can relate to what a blog is, they aren’t as clear on what distinguishes them from other websites. Maira Khan, an International Relations student at the University of Karachi, for instance, admitted that while she had heard of the term blog, the only difference she could spot between a blog and regular website was user comments. Other people thought blogs weren’t really different from the rest of the Web at all. Hina Mujeeb, a Mass Communications major, for instance, described a blog as “an interactive forum on the net like many others”.


Others tended to differentiate on the basis of the format. Zurfishan Saleem of the Sheikh Zayd Islamic Centre, for instance, pointed out that “a blog appears more like a personal diary, whereas a website is something more formal and official”. Another student, Maryam Mehboob, believed that, “Blogs as compared to other sites tends to be less traditional and more casual. While websites are usually dedicated for a collective cause, blogs are a personal statement reflecting the individuality of the person owning it.”


The truth is that the line between blogs and other websites is fast blurring. Ever since blogs have emerged as a platform for citizen journalism, it has become rather confusing for the average internet user to distinguish a blog from other news websites, especially if blogs are designed in a way to look like one. While many blogs are designed to resemble a web journal, more and more are being modelled to look like a regular website. A case in point is The Huffington Post blog which seems more or less completely identical to any regular news website, when it is in fact an aggregate political blog featuring opinion columns as blog posts from a myriad group of columnists.


Many other websites have at the same time embraced the impact of blogs by accommodating many of the features associated with a blog. The Guardian newspaper’s website for instance, now gives readers the options to “comment” on a news piece using a small form at the bottom of the page. Admittedly, the comments policy here tends to be far stricter than on other blogs, including even Guardian’s own blogs, where people are given a much more free hand in voicing their opinions. Other websites have incorporated RSS feeds and social bookmarking widgets that were first popularised by blogs.


The overriding point of difference between blogs and the rest of the cyber world, however, seems to be the structural format of blogs. Blogs, at least the popular ones, tend to be dynamic websites; their content is updated very frequently, sometimes several times within a single day. The updates are arranged in a reverse chronological order. The rest of the web tends to be more static. A business company’s website, for instance, may not be updated for several days, perhaps even months.

Additionally, these updates are database-driven, meaning that the content one enters into the blog is stored in a database, which can later be distributed as a ‘data feed’. RSS or Really Simple Syndication is the feed that most blogs employ. With RSS, content can be viewed through any RSS reader or aggregator on another website or on a computer or portable device. Again, the lines between blogs and other types of websites are blurring as more business owners choose to build their site with content management systems similar to RSS.

But those who do purposely make their blogs “look like blogs” tend to follow a similar content layout arrangement. A blogroll or a list comprising the blogger’s favorite blogs is usually placed on the left- or right-hand sidebar, which usually also contains to the blog’s achieve, its RSS feed and other blogging widgets, which are tiny add-ons that give added functionality to blogs.

Another difference can be traced down to ownership. A majority of blogs tend to be owned by individuals or groups of individuals with a common interest, but here too, the concept of corporate blogging is fast emerging. Almost all online news websites have their separate blogs within their larger websites and now even private enterprises and businesses have their own blogs, such as Google’s Gmail Blog.

The bottom line seems to be that with the growing Web 2.0 trends it’s much harder now to implicitly demarcate a blog from the rest of the World Wide Web. Whether it is in layout, style, content or comments, blogs and the rest of the World Wide Web seem to be merging and gaining more and more from each other.

Logic is Variable - it is the "variation" that matters - is a resource for my thoughts. More often, I blog form impressions and or generate ideas to see how they invoke reactions, to keep track of others’ work in the fields of my interests, or simply to rant or point out things that come to my attention.

Also, I use blogging as a platform to prune ideas. This is where I meet others. And “I am neither geek, nor nerd, I am not a hacker, a phreaker, a programmer or any variety of technoid dweeb.” Have a look and let me know what you think?