We really enjoyed the blog project for this class. At first it was unfamiliar to us, but as the semester moved on we began to like it. Overall, the experience not only taught us how to use and create blogs, but also kept us interested in current events related to e-marketing. The topic of e-marketing was a great choice considering that in the future it will play a vital role in how we all live our lives. We feel that the Internet has only begun to change the way we do many things.
While participating in this project, we learned that there are benefits as well as challenges. Advantages of blogging include being able to stay in touch with others, convenient posting, and the ability to customize the blog to make it more eye-catching. We look back and we feel that blogging might be a new hobby of ours. It provides a place for people to keep in touch not only with friends and family, but also with others who enjoy talking about the same subjects. It was convenient for us to post whenever we had time; we didn't have to rush just to get something down. It also allowed us to take our time and think about what we wanted to write. We believe we created a very appealing design, making it more fun to visit the site.
A challenge we faced was keeping track of each group’s blog URL. Another was not having other people comment on our blog. This wasn't a big problem, but it would have been nice to see other peoples’ opinions of our articles and commentaries.
The commenting on other's blogs was a good aspect of this project. It allowed us to voice our opinions and compare them to other peoples’ thoughts. Commenting also allows us to see what we missed by providing us with alternative points of view.
Blogging in the corporate setting can serve many purposes. For example, managers can provide work updates and provide training information for multiple employees. Co-workers can share information and collaborate on projects using the blog as a medium of communication. Also, blogs may be useful for companies who wish to communicate with customers. For example, fans can visit the Spiderman 3 movie blog can see promotional clips of the film, click on links to message boards in order to talk to other fans, and even download a Spiderman blog template for their own blogs.
Reflecting upon our own experience as bloggers, we would suggest to managers wishing to use the medium within their jobs to make sure that commenting is available. As mentioned, comments open new perspectives to a topic and can be helpful in making better informed decisions. We also believe that the length of each post makes a difference; people may be more likely to read what you have to say if you are concise in your ideas. Providing links and tags allows readers to find more information if they wish, and allows bloggers to focus more on their own ideas than on re-hashing the subject of discussion (that is, if the subject originated someplace other than the blog, e.g. a news article). Finally, we recommend that manager-bloggers be creative. Blogging is an exciting, dynamic, and relatively new type of communication. Many types of media can be incorporated, and it is advantageous to take advantage of this. YouTube clips and radio.blog.club players, for example, can add “life” to a page of words and pictures. RSS and Atom feeds allow users to subscribe to your blog and receive notification whenever you update it.
We learned a lot from this project and plan to continue to blog in the future. Thank you for reading!
—Shatari & Ryan
