According to Karpf's article on Measuring Influence in the Political Blogosphere, there are over 112 million active blogs online. Is a blog worth starting to promote an organization when it will have to compete with the other 112 million for an audience?
Matt Bai's The Argument shows how blogs can be an essential community builder and a way to spread your organization's message. Blogs can have 1 author or a community of authors. The comments feature allows for people to not only follow your blog but participate in it. And depending on how you respond to them (see the Social Media tips on Facebook and Twitter for some ideas), you can include encompass user comments in your posts, respond to the comments creating a dialogue, or even find blog contributors from these comments.
The key to creating a successful blog is: identify the message your organization wants to get out and frame this message as an interesting story that evokes emotion and empathy. Reach out to your target audience and direct them to your blog, and activate the comments function and even direct email, so your community can start to grow. Add other interesting blogs that pertain to similar topics or blogs that your users have written that relate somehow to your topic. Success: you've created a community where before there was none.
To track the success of your blog or to research other blogs, check out:
Technorati.com
Sitemeter.com
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