Marketing expert Max Blumberg conversed with Bob Bly, saying:

[…] Blogging is more likely to raise brand awareness, but that the impact on direct sales will be more difficult to assess. Blogging is akin to, and probably forms part of public relations whose direct impact on revenue is difficult to measure, but definitely exists.

Absolutely spot on. It seems like this and other conversations Bob has had about his previous dismissal of blogging have gone some way towards persuading him that blogs require at the very least some investigation. Indeed Bob has now started his own blog. In the first post, he says:

In this blog, I want to provide the blogosphere with a view from my side of the fence as a member of another “sphere” – old-fashioned direct marketers who still believe the main purpose of marketing is to get the cash register ringing and not just have “conversations.”

This is great. I applaud Bob’s willingness to experiment and explore a medium with which he is not familiar, but I hope that he tries to dig a bit deeper than many marketeers currently do to see the genuine usefulness of blogs, not just as a way to communicate with (and, in some unfortunate cases, broadcast to) a market, but also in other contexts. After all, which business tool is flexible enough to be employed as a CRM tool, for knowledge sharing, or as a lightweight CMS?

I’ll give you a hint. It ends in ‘-og’.