José Ignacio Gafo Gómez-Zamalloa

Imagine someone able to make price of your share drop significantly, just by blogging about your company? What would you about it? Would you pay that person or company to speak favourably about you?

The latter is a reality. It happened to Apple when www.ENGADGET.com, one well-known blog, wrote about a rumour about the i-Phone.

In El País from September 16, a spanish newspaper, you can find a complete article about the influence that the blogs have. In that article you can find among other things that:

* The bloggers were initially asking for money to get their hobby financed. However, the blogs have become a big business in which the estimated advertising is approx. 21.500 million € in 2007 and will be up to 40.000 million € in 2010.
* Most of the well-known and more influential blogs are technological
* Right now we have 73 million blogs in the world; 120.000 new every day
* Blogs are a perfect example of Web 2.0 where you create and share
* It has become one of most influential communication tools available.

On top of the first questions I ask myself: How far can they go? Where is their limit? When will they lose their credibility?

The tricky and key point to me is the last one: CREDIBILITY. So far they have been very successful for people trust them. They do so because the blogs are written by someone that gains nothing when writing favourably or negatively about something. However, as long as it becomes a business the situation is changing dramatically. Because I really doubt that the blogger will be objective when speaking about a company that pays you a huge of money in advertising. So will tend to think everybody (or not?).

Share your thoughts and comments.

Think Different!!!

Ignacio Gafo

Posted on 16 September 2007 in Nuevas Tendencias, International Marketing

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