By Courtesy sxc.hu Corporations take note: now everyone has a bullhorn. In The Black Go East, Young Man Asia’s newest travel darling, Vietnam, tops our monthly roundup of what’s hot Spinning It One of the region’s leading PR gurus talks about his industry Serenity Now Yoga takes off as professionals search for calm in the eye of the storm Sealing the Deal Business Today's picks the city's best in business dining

By  Kimberly Adams

A technology-savvy ARMY of professionals, teenagers, political activists and so-called ‘citizen journalists’ is changing the way information is being disseminated by keeping online journals documenting everything from personal musings to political rants. From their homes and from internet cafés, they are writing about everything — including business. Perhaps theirs, perhaps yours.

Whether the news and opinions they share in their online community (the ‘blogosphere’) can help or hurt local businesses will depend on just how nerdy (and forward-thinking) executive decision-makers can be in the face of this new dimension in customer and corporate relations.

With an estimated 21.9 million blogs in existence, chances are, something on at least a few of them is affecting your business. One community, The Egyptian Blog Ring, egybloggers.com, claims to link some 500 blogs. At VoicesofEgypt.com, 20 contributors maintain a central page dedicated to issues of technology, politics and other topics (such as the ongoing search for extraterrestrial life).

“Blogging is very new for Egyptians,” says Hani Gamal, a senior developer at the IT firm BMB Group and a contributor to VoicesofEgypt.com, “and [people] are proving they can use the technology very well.”

One example of business-savvy use of the technology is TourEgypt.net, a site that compiles information about tourism sites and companies. The home page features guest writers posting tourism-related topics, and the site also includes a forum section where anyone can create a blog/Travel log. Company chairman and site designer Jimmy Dunn says the blogs provide free content for the site and bring in some new traffic.

“Certainly, it has [attracted more people to the site],” says Dunn. “Some people are clued to blogs. But to say that it has made a big, significant difference would be incorrect. What it has done is give the bloggers considerable business, which is fine with us.”

Many of the bloggers are small business owners. In exchange for providing a free post, they can post a link to their website. Dunn says this can be a worthwhile investment, as the hosted pages attract anywhere from 200 to 10,000 visitors per day. For example, a blog on Luxor receives an average of 5,000 hits per day.

“It does work, and I’ve got some bloggers to prove it. [Jane Akshar of] Flat’s in Luxor, who runs our Luxor News Blog, is reporting a doubling of business since starting hers.”

But, thus far, most of the blogging community in Egypt seems to be focusing solely on politics, according to Gamal and Dunn. “They fill the space on the blogs with new comments and new ideas,” says Gamal, “but they cannot get out of politics. Most of the blogs are speaking about politics.”

Gamal recommends to clients that they consider using this opportunity as a way to reach new customers, and to develop their own businesses. “ Arabs in general are not using the blogs so much, but they should be. They can [create] more flexibility to their websites [for] their business.”

Dunn notes that web technology also allows companies to immediately track how much attention a particular site is getting, thus learning more about their site’s visitors.

“The blogs help us get a grip on what people want to read, because we can see which topics are most popular.”

The term “blog” is short for weblog, which is essentially an online diary. The phenomenon is generally agreed to have begun in the mid-1990s, but has taken off only in the past few years. According to a blog search engine, Technorati, the size of the blogosphere has been doubling approximately every 5.5 months, with a new one being created about every second.

Aspiring writers can choose from dozens of popular web hosts to begin their postings. Many are free, although some offer premium fee-based services. A user simply goes to their chosen host, such as Google’s Blogger, MSN Spaces, AOL’s Journals, and registers a name for their blog. After choosing the layout and appearance of their page, individuals can begin posting.

While most services have a simple composition window in which people can type their posts or link to other media, other sites allow users to post from their mobile phones or instant messenger. There are also software programs such WordPress, MovableType, and Serendipity that require a bit more technological sophistication, but offer a bit more control as to look or behavior of the design.

Once a user is ready to post, he or she can choose to make it public or keep it private, link it to a blogring, or allow other people to subscribe to it and receive notifications when it has been updated.

Businesses around the world have been paying close attention to the expansion of this phenomenon, tapping into blog rings for corporate research and using their own cadre of bloggers to build their company image and reach out to the desirable 18-34, affluent demographic most likely to be visiting blogs says US-based research firm Comscore Media Metrix in its report “Behaviors of the Blogosphere.”

At the recent BlogOn Social Media Summit in New York, global research firm Guidewire Group announced the result of their two-week survey of about 140 businesspersons on their blogging activities. Among the sample, 89% said their company was either already blogging or planning to do so. Most of those with blogs launched them within the last year.

At BMB, Gamal has not seen many businesses using blogs thus far. He says some new technology firms such as Rountech and ArabIP are planning to integrate blogs into their websites, but most companies are not embracing the trend.

“Many of [TourEgypt.net’s] clients are somewhat internet knowledgeable. But I know some relatively large tourism companies that hardly have a presence,” says Dunn. “The ones who do are going to win out, or at least become larger ones.”

Blogs can provide a new way to reach customers, as well as a direct link to certain target groups. The advent of search engines, like the Google Blog Search and Technorati, allow web users to do searches within the blogosphere. Tech-savvy consumers are using this tool to research products and services, reading and commenting on the rants and raves of others.

“Travel in particular is very internet-oriented these days,” says Dunn. “Egypt could do so much more if the tourism businesses were really connected”

“[Companies] can be more interactive with visitors of their websites, using the blogs, and create more open spaces to know the people who are using their site,” says Gamal. “Let’s say that there is a problem, they can know. They can make surveys using the blogs about their products and how much it’s popular.”

“Tech-savvy consumers are using this tool to research products and services, reading and commenting on the rants and raves of others.”

The blogging community is also a coveted consumer group. Though most of the market research on bloggers is focused on the United States and Europe, general trends pervade the blogging world. Comscore Media Metrix measured the online activity of more than 2 million global internet users in the first three months of this year. and found that, “Compared to the average internet user, blog readers are significantly more likely to live in wealthier households, be younger and connect to the Web on high-speed connections.” The company’s August 2005 “Behaviors of the Blogosphere” report also found that blog readers are much more likely to shop online than those that do not read blogs.

But Gamal says blogging has not quite caught on yet locally, and many businesses feel the relatively small blog community is not worth the time and effort to create and maintain a blog.

“I don’t think that [they] are seeing the long view of blogs yet, and their capacity for building their businesses, though that capacity is very much there,” says Dunn. “So, the younger Egyptians are the ones who are blogging, and they don’t own businesses, but they are political.”

Many large corporations abroad already operate ‘official’ blogs (none in Egypt appear to do so), but, if one thing is true of the internet in general, it is that it is difficult to control. Since anyone can start a blog, disgruntled employees, former employees, business partners, and the families of all the above are free to go online and share their thoughts with the world.

It only takes a few minutes to set up an anonymous account and begin disseminating damaging information about a company, but it can take a company months of blog-tracking and delicate PR to reverse damage.

But it is not just a company’s reputation that can be at stake. Software giants Microsoft and Apple have both had experiences with insiders leaking details of new software before its release, and there are dozens of examples of consumers discovering defects or security flaws in programs or products, only to reveal these finds to their online audiences.

With the stakes so high in this relatively new medium, many companies have developed corporate guidelines for their employees. Organizations from Yahoo to Chrysler and Plaxo are making workers aware of what they should, and, more importantly, what they should not be sharing online.

Despite the risks, Gamal still recommends his clients explore blogs as a business tool. With their low cost and minimal maintenance, a blog can be an ideal way for small businesses in particular to get attention.

“If I’m speaking to a client about using a blog,” he says, “I don’t hide my opinion that I like blogging very much. I tell them it’s worth it to find out very useful information on the internet, because blogs around the world are something widely used.”

“Blogs can probably help the small businesses at this point more than the larger ones,” says Dunn, “because for a small business, it doesn’t take too much exposure to make a lot of difference.”

Individual bloggers can use pay-per-click services like Google’s AdSense to direct advertisers to their site, but for many businesses using blogs, the online journals are just a PR tool.

“We give a link to the blogger’s commercial site, if they have one, and we reserve room at the top of the page for our own promotion,” says Dunn. “But I would not call it a great moneymaker at this point. In fact, we spend a great deal of time talking people into posting, checking up on the bloggers, and helping them if they have problems.”

Meanwhile, companies are scrambling to develop new ways to shape and manage their messages and image in this difficult-to-control forum. Although the movement might not yet have caught on here the way it has in companies in other parts of the world, BMB Group’s Gamal says they are likely to become more common. “It can be very good to build strong relationships [using blogs],” he says, “even between the employees in the company, and building more active communication with the clients.”

“In the short-term,” says Dunn. “I don’t see them being used too much for business. Long-term, if blogs continue as strong as currently on the Internet, and they are actually somewhat of a pop item at the moment, then Egypt will embrace them.”  bt