Peer Review Article

Heard, Reina
Peer Review Assignment(Revised)
October 23, 2008

Article Review on Blogs and Business Conversations By: Srividya Raghavan

When you think of blogging what comes to mind? Does social media come to mind?When I first thought of blogging I thought it was a way for people to vent publicly or privately about products,personal life, and or just to rant. Quickly, I learned that it's not about just about ranting. It's about listening. And through listening you find out what your customers want,needs,satisfactions, or dissatisfactions are. According to this article, Srividya Raghavan (2006) said,"The Internet has moved human interaction to a virtual dimension."

I learned that blogging has been a big part of many businesses and those companies all over the world listen to rational and logical customers on their blog sites. Many people ask why businesses choose to blog. Well, I find it quite simple to answer. It’s because companies pay big bucks to hear what their customers have to say and what their wants and needs are. According to Raghavan (2006),"The World Wide Web has helped create online communities that link to one another and form a complicated web of interactions."

"Corporations that operate in these environs have begun to listen to the ‘voice’ of their communities and participate in their ‘conversations’. Blogs are quickly emerging as a useful media of participating in consumer conversations(Raghavan,2006)."I was actually surprised by how many blogs are being counted as being more credible and how useful most of the blogs about companies are being major influencers in consumer’s lives.

This article stresses how technology's role is affecting social media and how company's and people's role in communicating with the consumers are vastly changing. Recently, I have learned much about what social media is and how it can be applied to everyday life.With social media forums such as Twitter.com, facebook.com, and myspace.com a person can learn alot about how companies and or consumers feel about a product or service.


I would personally like to know more about if the companies find it worth reading or is it only to make the consumers feel like they have a so in the products? This could be relevant to my fortune 500 company Bank of America in the fact that Bank of America has lots of customer’s with ideas and if there is some type of blog site that listened to the consumers ideas or thoughts then the too could benefit from using blogs as a source of staying connected to their service/product provider.

I believe that by allowing various focus groups and or consumers to experience the social media networks about their company allows for the company to know what kind of relationship/s they have with various consumers or potential consumers based on others reviews to products or services.

REFERENCES

Raghavan, S. (2006). Blogs and Business Conversations.


Article Title: Blogs and Business Conversations
Srividya Raghavan
Srividya Raghavan is Doctoral Fellow, ICFAI Institute for Management Teachers, Hyderabad. E-mail: srividya_rags@yahoo.com .