Ignore bloggers at your own peril

Even though it was Merriam-Webster's most looked up word in 2004, for the many who still don't know, Blog is short for Weblog: a website that contains an on-line personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks provided by the writer. I believe it is an essential new communication tool with which to create or alter reputations.

As the ultimate vanity publishing medium, posturing or, indeed, down right egotism will find welcome audiences as long as the content is engaging. With my personal PR gurus like Mark Borkowski, www.Borkowski.co.uk and Richard Edelman, www.edelman.com writing blogs that suggest they're at the top of their game, the rest of us need to pay attention.

Although my blog, www.BrianBerkman.com is more a collection of ramblings rather than a focused discourse on the communications industry, it has achieved two important things: won me new business and elevated my profile sufficiently enough for me to be invited to address a conference of peers on the subject. As with all media, blogging has its pitfalls. The fact that it is both instant and global, means that the volume of comments can be too high to moderate and comments could be libelous. As this is still a new area in law, defamation that occurs in the Blogasphere is still untested but my guess is that the publisher and not the author may be responsible.

As a new medium that has its sails filled by the zeitgeist, this is one boat that shouldn't sail by while communicators wave from the shore. The fact that The Berkman Centre (no relation!) for Internet studies at Harvard Law School, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/ meets every Thursday to discuss Blogs, means that opinion leaders are taking blogging very seriously.

Many thought that having a website would be an essential marketing tool instead of the online brochures many sites have become, and I'm certain many Blogs will spark little interest or no action but when the blogger sings in tune, I predict it will have all the requirements of a word-of-mouth virus as described in The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

Ignore us at your peril.