In an article on the front page of today’s Washington Post Business section, reporter Sarah Halzack notes, several years belatedly, that Marketing Moves to the Blogosphere. She rounds up a few of the local suspects to comment on their corporate blogs, including Bill Marriott, Honest Tea and Viget Labs, the Web firm that created my new site/blog. She even quotes Viget designer Samantha Warren, who created the new look for debbieweil.com.

What’s remarkable about the article is that somehow the good folks at The Wash Post appear to have been oblivious to the explosion of social media and blogging as a new way of doing business here in town. To wit: The Washington Times ran a front page article (featuring the staged photo at right) on business blogging four years ago, on Aug. 14, 2004, titled What’s all the blog about?

It mentioned the Air Conditioning Contractors of America as one example of a local biz blogger.

I hope this article by the Post is the first of others to come, highlighting what Washington DC’s professional associations, non-profits and academia are doing in addition to businesses—cf American Red Cross, Georgetown Law Faculty, MACPA. Full disclosure: MACPA is a former client.

It would be interesting to be able to search the Post 200 for which local companies are using social media as a new marketing, communications and recruiting channel. Dan Beyers, are you listening?

Sarah kindly quotes me as follows:

Though blogs may not always yield immediate results, they can be part of a "halo effect" that ultimately gives a business a bigger online presence, says Debbie Weil, a corporate blogging consultant and author of "The Corporate Blogging Book." "I think that the really important thing about using a blog as a business strategy is that usually you cannot connect the dots directly from blogs to revenue," Weil said.
- The Washington Post, Aug. 25, 2008

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