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?

I ran across an interesting article about the future of retail marketing and on line marketing. The article speculates on a future of Retail in the Web 2.0 Environment.

“It’s a scary scenario. A few major players could take over Web 2.0,” said LeHong, suggesting that a merged entity such as a combined Google and Amazon.com could dominate as a “pretailer,” a product search and price comparison portal.” He calls this GOOGAZON.

The fear here is that such an entity would begin to dominate transactions to a level that they dictate terms to the retailers and business owners. Similar to how a Walmart store effects traditional retail stores in some markets it moves into. This type of entity could flex some big wallet marketing muscle to make sure they are the ones dicatating the terms of the new Web 2.0 Retail Market.

Personally while I agree that in theory this is all possible I have faith that many online business owners and marketers out there will not want to lose their ability to market and sell on line in whatever way they choose. I think that this type of relationship would attract an audience but there is still at least as many if not more consumers for whom the Web 2.0 Retail landscape means more choices, more information and they will want to have choices other than a Googazon type company. The most obvious choice for those consumers is going to be a retail blog and retail blog marketing program.

The retail blog will offer all the features of user input instantly updated information and user reviews that will increase loyalty and attract some of the best most qualified buyers on line. I talked to a company today with a retail blog that recieved 30,000 visitors in the last 3 days. Talk about increase in sales.