Blogging Brands

For the first time, I found myself generally agreeing with what Rettberg had to say regarding blogging and using it as a social platform as well as for marketing and advertisements. Personally, I only really follow blogs for reading short stories or poems and such, or for baking (yay sweet tooth!) and other cooking recipes. When I read about Manolo's Shoe Blog, I began to realize how smart this blogger really is. First of all, it benefits both sides. The blogger gets recognition, giving himself a name in the industry I suppose, and it also benefits the actual Manolo designer because it will then prompt other people to buy that designer's shoes. In this sense, it's a win-win situation. Although I am not personally really into fashion, a lot of my friends are, and therefore I heard about a website called http://lookbook.nu/, which is a social networking website where people can create profiles and upload pictures of themselves in their favorite outfits for people to see. I never thought of that as an advertising mechanism but I suppose it works that way as well.

Another interesting aspect of this chapter was Dooce's blog and how she was making money off of it. It was only when she added graphical advertisements as opposed to her text advertisements that it increased her followers and income. As someone who is a visual person, I couldn't tell you why I prefer visuals over text, and I thought I would do a little research on the statistics. I found that apparently visuals are processed 60,000 times faster by the brain than by text! (Source: Hubspot) And this statistic is pretty astonishing as well : " just one month after the introduction of Facebook timeline for brands, visual content -- photos and videos -- saw a 65% increase in engagement" (Source: Hubspot) and there were many more where generally most people prefer visuals over text.