Business Week has a cover story this month on how blogs will change your business. It’s a rather lengthy and unorthodox article choked full of fantastic information. It is written in a true blog style format, so their readers who don’t blog get the full effect. They use very strong language in the article suggesting that businesses that aren’t pursuing blogs now will be left behind in 5 years when blogs rule the internet space.

They pointed out a number of great things in the article beginning with the idea that blogs are the hottest thing on the net and they are no longer something businesses can go on avoiding. The sheer volume of blogs hitting the net each day suggest that eventually someone will be out there talking about your business and Business Week is suggesting you beat them to the punch.

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business — including yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite. (And yes, that goes for us, too.)

First, a few numbers. There are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Some discuss poetry, others constitutional law. And, yes, many are plain silly. “Mommy tells me it may rain today. Oh Yucky Dee Doo,” reads one April Posting. Let’s assume that 99.9% are equally off point. So what? That leaves some 40 new ones every day that could be talking about your business, engaging your employees, or leaking those merger discussions you thought were hush-hush.

…And here’s the killer: Blog posts linger on the Web forever.

Business Week points out the desire for community people have and as technology moves forward community is being found online. People desire a place to share their ideas, stories, comments and even pictures. More importantly though they desire to do it around a specific subject – a donut company, a job they hate, or book they just read. The bottom line is they no longer need the traditional mass media outlets to get their message to the public, the blogs provide that avenue. This is both a beneficial and scary prospect for businesses.

Sure, most blogs are painfully primitive. That’s not the point. They represent power. Look at it this way: In the age of mass media, publications like ours print the news. Sources try to get quoted, but the decision is ours. Ditto with letters to the editor. Now instead of just speaking through us, they can blog. And if they master the ins and outs of this new art — like how to get other bloggers to link to them — they reach a huge audience.

…For Sifry, it’s not the growth of the same Web, but an entirely new one. It’s wrapped up far more in people’s day-to-day lives. It’s connected to time. The way he describes it, the Web we’ve come to know is mostly a collection of documents. A library. These documents don’t change much. Try Googling Donald Trump, and you’re more likely to find his Web page than a discussion of his appearance last night on The Apprentice.

Blogs are different. They evolve with every posting, each one tied to a moment. So if a company can track millions of blogs simultaneously, it gets a heat map of what a growing part of the world is thinking about, minute by minute. E-mail has carried on billions of conversations over the past decade. But those exchanges were private. Most blogs are open to the world. As the bloggers read each other, comment, and link from one page to the next, they create a global conversation.

…Why does this matter? Think of the implications for businesses of getting an up-to-the-minute read on what the world is thinking. Already, studios are using blogs to see which movies are generating buzz. Advertisers are tracking responses to their campaigns. “I’m amazed people don’t get it yet,” says Jeff Weiner, Yahoo’s senior vice-president who heads up search. “Never in the history of market research has there been a tool like this.”

Many have talked about “the Blog bubble� or that it’s a passing fad. Business Week makes a great point about the “Bubble.�

The question came up at a panel discussion last week: Any chance that a blog bubble could pop? The answer is really easy: no.

At least not an investment bubble. Venture firms financed only $60 million in blog startups last year, according to industry tracker VentureOne. Chump change compared to the $19.9 billion that poured into dot-coms in 1999. The difference is that while dot-coms promised to make loads of money, blogs flex their power mostly by disrupting the status quo.

The bigger point, which is blindingly obvious when you think about it, is that the dot-com era was powered by companies — complete with programmers, marketing budgets, Aeron chairs, and burn rates. The masses of bloggers, by contrast, are normal folks with computers: no budget, no business plan, no burn rate, and — that’s right — no bubble.

Business Week makes a bold prediction about how Blogs will shape mainstream media and how advertisers will need to adjust their strategies as Blogs shape the internet.

A prediction: Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere. Over the next five years, this could well divide winners and losers in media. And in the process, mainstream media will start to look more and more like — you guessed it — blogs. Clay Shirky, a Web expert at New York University, calls it “an absorption process where the thing doing the absorbing changes.”

…Still, blogs could end up providing the perfect response to mass media’s core concern: the splintering of its audience. Advertisers desperate to reach us need to tap niches (because we get together only once a year to watch the Super Bowl). By piggybacking on blogs, they can start working that vast blogocafé, table by table. Smart ones will get feedback, links to individuals — and their friends. That’s every marketer’s dream.

I’m not sure if this is an experiment by Business Week – a well established business journal – to parley into the blogosphere timed perfectly to coincide with the release of the Business Week Blog (a major stroke of marketing genius on their part if it is) , but whether they had mixed motives in the timing of the release, it’s still great information about Business Blogging and increases the credibility of the tool.

To find more about how Blogs can affect your business, check out Nebo Group business blogging.

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