6 Marketers: Why Blogging Matters

Churbuck.com has a post up with 6 marketing professionals opinions on blogs for corporations.

#1 - PR and Blogging – A Love Story or Peaceful Coexistence 

Dan Greenfield  is vice president of corporate communications at EarthLink. 

"We are living an age where boundaries are collapsing, definitions are changing and roles are combining.  Blogging and PR need each other, belong with each other, even though they can sometimes appear to be working against each other."

 #2 – Blogging and the “new influencers”

Eric Kintz is VP, Global Marketing Strategy at Hewlett-Packard.

"Marketers will need to identify first the new key blogger-influencers in their space, using tools likeAlexa or Technorati, and treat them more and more like some of the other influencing constituencies such as analysts or journalists."

 #3 – The role of blogging in the changing world of advertising

Will Waugh is Senior Director, Communications – ANA.

"The utilization of blogs is critical, particularly in a growing world where social currency is more and more important. They are powerful communication and business tools which can connect with a variety of audiences for your brands/products/services. These audiences range from core customers to prospects to influencers to investors."

 #4 – The role of blogging as part of an integrated web strategy

David Churbuck is Vice President, Global Web Marketing at Lenovo.

"In context, a blog is an efficient way for a corporation to quickly publish onto the Internet and through a syndication pipeline, messages that may need rapid dissemination or a more personal voice than the corporate online edifices represented by so-called traditional web sites. Taken as a “light” content management system, blogs can be regarded as loosely associated sites that can have a strong effect on the organization’s primary web presence."

#5 - Drive Harmony in Conversational Touchpoints

Pete Blackshaw is Chief Marketing Officer of Nielsen BuzzMetrics

"Blogging is a great way to put a fresh new face on a corporate structure, but the rest of the organization can't be too far behind.  As corporate leaders, we need to develop the right strategies and tactics to ignite and catalyze positive change leveraging blog tools and methods while keeping the rest of the organization in tow."

#6 - Creativity, Innovation + Blogging

David Armano is Creative VP at Digitas.

"Looking back at my blog after nearly eight months, I realize that in addition to building a community and gaining momentum—I have created a the ultimate digital sketchbook for myself. Blogging is a great way to document your creative process for future reference for say, writing a book."

Free idea: Sun's Blackbox Launch

Sun's new Blackbox mobile data center may or may not be a great idea technically -- that kind of assessment is outside my area of expertise.

It is, however, the perfect product for a marketing idea I developed almost ten years ago for a leading data storage hardware vendor. That idea never made it out of the agency to the client meeting, and now I offer it to Sun, free of charge.

Simply, the idea was to demonstrate the power of high-capacity, rapidly-scalable storage by doing two things:

• Embarking on what can only be considered a quest: storing a digital image of the face of every person on Earth
• Locate the boxes storing the images in iconic public locations: Times Square, Red Square, Syndey Harborside, and so forth, in a giant glass box, with walk-up digital cameras and wall-to-wall monitors cycling through random global portraits.

Storage is storage, in many ways -- the core of this idea was to enoble this inherently bland medium by creating a snapshot not of the natural wonders of the globe, but of the people who occupy it.

There you go, Sun. Yours if you want it, just about the biggest idea I ever came up with. (And if anybody knows Scott McNealy or Anil Gadre, feel free to forward this idea along.)