An article today titled “Blogs for Shoppers” in the Wall Street journal Personal Journal Section Page 1 gives another validation to what everyone in our company has been talking about for the last year. Retail Websites, and Manufacturers of products can benefit tremendously from a professional corporate blog and a business blog marketing campaign.

Here is a quick excerpt:
“Shoppers scratching their heads for gift suggestions are seeking advice from a cadre of bloggers who are up on the hot products in their fields. Although mining the sites may require sifting through industry news and the occasional life story, blogs can provide ideas from people with particular expertise — backpack suggestions from trekkers or gadget advice from techies”

The article by JESSICA E. VASCELLARO goes on to provide some examples of niche blogs that are popular. The ones they show are good, but doesn’t even scratch the surface of whats out there… pull up some blog stats about how many blogs are created every day and how many people read blogs(55 + Million), and its not hard to see that there are some retailers and manufacturers out there that need to get to work branding their company and products in the blogOsphere. If they you as a retailer or a manufacturer are not controlling your brand, who is?

Yahoo is building a different kind of social network according to bizreport…. If you heard it described you might at first think “oh yea like myspace”, and it is sort of, they are using brands and products that people are already passionate about and building from there ie the first launch in this product will be http://wii.yahoo.com/ using the Nintendo Wii’s already huge popularity to springboard their site into popularity… sounds a lot like how many blogs have become popular.

I took a look around and while I’m sure sites like this will do well for Yahoo it seemed kind of ho hum.. another portal site with links and message boards and reader feedback and videos.. nothing too impressive but well done. I think IGN has been doing this for a long time. Take a look.

Once Bloggers had to sneak in to write about fashion shows and other high profile gatherings now they get invited and get afforded VIP treatment.

We talk a lot here about branding and the power of blogging. Here is a quote from the link above.

“This is the first time ever that fashion bloggers are attracting the attention of the fashion industry. As bloggers get more followers and advertisers start to shift more spending to them, fashion designers are seeing these independent web publishers as a new marketing opportunity and ego boost to their creations. ”

Key word of note here that I saw:  attention, followers,advertisers, independant web publishers,  new marketing opportunity…..some other interesting tag items in the article are viral marketing, cost effective, public relations, reputation  and other positively powered marketing words.
Just another example of how companies and high profile industry segments are begginning to take advantage of this new marketing opportunity to generate business.