Blogs

If you have dismissed blogs as a new set of toys meant for the nerds and the jobless, you may have already lost a million potential clients. That is the message European and US companies are sending to India Inc. Swathes of western companies are seeing the power of the blog — in both fetching customers and improving image. Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki, a list of business blogs, reports that in February, 22 of the Fortune 500 companies ran blogs. Soon after, 18 more did. Charlene Li, vice-president and principal analyst, Forrester Research, estimates her blog posts were a catalyst that brought more than a million dollars to the Massachusetts, US-based company.
But most Indian businesses just do not seem to care. “Business blogging in India is only seen among early adopters, I cannot think of even a handful of CEO-level people blogging in India,” says Ajit Balakrishnan, CEO, Rediff.com, and one of India’s pioneer business bloggers. Balakrishnan says his blog is seen by around 800,000 readers a month. “This is many times the number that read any OpEd page in India. All CEOs should blog,” he adds.
Experts say businesses in India keep their eyes shut to blogs as many are organised around a control structure in which consumers are talked to, and not with. However, a few of the IT and media companies in India are starting to see the light. News channel CNN-IBN’s editor Rajdeep Sardesai, however busy he may be, blogs once a month on the channel’s website. Bangalore-based Infosys Technologies and Tekriti Software in Gurgaon are two other active users of blogs.
While blog analysts agree on their power as messaging tools, they warn that you need to be careful. “Use them to advance your interests but do not get carried away,” says Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of Harvard Business Review. “There is a lot of hype around blogs,” says Jacques Kemp, CEO, ING Asia-Pacific, a pioneer in financial corporate blogging. “So, be realistic about your expectations. We believe all sorts of businesses can make use of blogs for benefits.” Kemp says ING was the first financial company to launch an advisor blog (www.pickuradvisor.com) in India.
David Brain, president and CEO (Europe), Edelman, the world’s third-largest public relations agency, has a rule of thumb: “Use a blog to learn from consumers. Build credible support for your initiatives, and reach out to stakeholders. That will help you co-create a brand story and a reputation with thousands of online citizens participating passionately.” The idea of engaging ‘online citizens’ excites Rajeev Karwal, former head of consumer durables, Reliance Retail. “Social networking sites such as Orkut and Facebook will soon redefine the way we look at market segmentation,” he says, adding, “You come across clusters of people with similar interests. Is there any better way [than blogs] to take your message to them at once?”
An Edelman white paper says that, on average, two in every 10 blog readers have taken some sort of action as a result of reading a blog. In the case of Balakrishnan’s blog alone, that equates to 160,000 people. With the world increasingly going online, can India Inc. afford to miss out on such exposure?
Indian companies need to realise that if they do not tell their story, one of those millions of bloggers out there will. Blogs are not going away anytime soon.

• Almost 175,000 new blogs created everyday
• More than 1.6 Million blog updates are posted online everyday
• 74% of Japan people read Blogs
• 43% of South Koreans read Blogs
• 39% of Chinese people read Blogs
• 27% of U.S people read Blogs