According to Bloomberg, blogging is another channel for communication in a company’s marketing concept and the closest way of contact between an organization and the customers. Nevertheless it basically depends on the target group whether blogging is useful for a company or a product. In Bloomberg’s opinion especially quite successful companies with a high degree of customer and employee satisfaction should use blogging to build up a closer relationship as it becomes another strategic approach integrated in structured marketing concepts.

In my opinion Bloomberg is right in pointing out the target group’s importance for the decision process whether to use blogging as not every (potential) customer is attracted through blogs or does not even use the Internet at all. Another influencing aspect for that decision is the kind of product; companies, as an example, which sell cigarettes or alcohol might think carefully whether blogging is useful for promoting their stuff or if it could just lead to controversial discussions which might end in a bad image for the organization. Additionally, dissatisfaction from customer or employees could also cause an even worse image as they could public those opinions. On the other hand, companies with reasonable products which already have good internal and external reputation could start blogging to further improve their image.

Bloomberg forecasted that blogging is supposed to become more structured and strategic to be used in their marketing concept which could confuse or even discourage actual audiences as they might prefer blogging for being not strategic. By recognizing blogs used as a marketing tool to increase product sales it would maybe not have the desired effect with the target group.

In my opinion, blogging is a marketing tool but not as important to be necessarily included in a marketing concept as it is, so far, more kind of niche marketing but could, however, gain importance in future.