It feels a little self-referential to write about blogs as a business tool in a blog that’s, well, ultimately meant to be a business tool. But with the NYT blessing the concept of using blogs to help generate business, I couldn’t resist.

Most of the business-related blogs I’ve come across seem to have two main goals. The first is to raise awareness of the underlying business, both by organic search traffic - Google loves blog content - and later on by getting other bloggers (and ultimately mainstream press) to link to and/or quote the blog. For service-oriented businesses (e.g. lawyers and their “blawgs“), the other goal is often to demonstrate expertise, hopefully to convince visitors that the bloggers know their stuff and are worth hiring to help with whatever type of problems they might have.

All of this is well and good, but I think it misses an important point. One of the biggest advantages of the blog compared to other marketing media is its ability to convey the personality of the blogger. You can adopt a much more informal tone in a blog, without seeming unprofessional (or fake-folksy), than you ever could in traditional marketing materials such as a web site or whitepaper.

In service businesses, the client’s level of comfort with the people they’ll be working with is often at least as important as their expertise. Small service firms have a dilemma - people who don’t know them won’t hire them, but they don’t have the time (or access) to make personal impressions on the bulk of their target market. The blog allows a potential client to at least get a first impression of the personalities of the people they’d be hiring - are they too serious? Too goofy? Too techie? Not techie enough?

In an ideal world, our networking efforts would be more than enough to fill our pipelines. In the later stages of some firms’ evolution, that often becomes the case. But for those of us who aren’t quite there yet, hopefully our blogs will introduce us to a few extra people we wouldn’t have had a chance to meet over lunch.

No medium is better suited for word-of-mouth marketing than the Internet - people have been forwarding jokes, chain letters and silly videos for as long as they’ve had email. There have been many controversial attempts at “seeding” word of mouth by paying people to spread the word. Still, the best way to get a viral message out there remains the simplest, but most elusive - make a piece of content that’s unique and entertaining enough that people will want to forward it to their friends.

Nokia discovers the true origins of hip hop

The rewards of getting it right are obvious. Not only do you get broad reach - often millions of views - without spending a dime on media, you also get people consuming your message in its entirety, instead of getting up to go to the bathroom or fridge. But while it’s hard enough to get people to sit through a regular TV commercial, the number of videos that actually get forwarded in any quantity is vanishingly small.What’s the secret? Production quality does seem to matter - as much attention as the amateurs get, most of the highly-forwarded videos are pretty well done. Some are pretty eye-popping while others are just downright weird. Thought-provoking narrative is clearly not a factor.I won’t pretend to know the secret, but if I had to guess, the biggest factor is pure novelty - people just want to see things they’ve never seen before. As they say… that’s entertainment.

Social shopping/retailing has been getting a lot of press lately, especially its role in helping small retailers reach customers. Top sites include stylehive, Kaboodle and ThisNext, which are all dedicated to online shopping, with users flagging favorite objects available at any online retailer.

Like more general-purpose social networks, these sites play to users’ egos by having profile pages that show off a user’s individual taste. As is typical in most communities, you get a small handful of alpha-users who generate a disproportionate share of the content.. sites like stylehive encourage these people by allowing users to “follow” lead trendsetters and receive updates when they flag new items.

While social shopping is getting a lot of buzz, the volume generated from these sites barely registers - I wasn’t able to find any stats as to what percentage of online retail dollars come from social shopping. Keep in mind, too, that online sales are still only about 5 percent of total retail in the US. But the phenomenon is likely to spread, especially when it migrates to more general social networks like Facebook and Myspace.

When it comes to shopping of any kind, only a tiny minority of the population can be called tastemakers and the rest are followers, buying whatever friends or magazines say is stylinsh, or whatever is put in front of them by retailers. But there’s also been a resurgence of interest in original and unusual goods. For all the homogenization that’s been happening in the retail landscape, flea markets never really went away. As online shopping matures, it will be interesting to see the balance between the walmart.com-style megasites and the bazaar-like style represented by social shopping.

Businesses started using social networks to market to consumers ages ago, it doesn’t even seem weird anymore for a corporation to have a MySpace page with tens of thousands of “friends”, and of course this year the politicians got into the act in a big way. In keeping with Facebook’s more controlled style, things started a bit more slowly - initially a lot of businesses formed Groups, and people could belong to them to show affinity, hear the latest news, etc.

Now Facebook has full-blown business pages, where companies can show off their products, announce events, etc… and they’re starting to tailor them for different kinds of businesses, so that restaurant pages have a tweaked version of the Wall app that lets people post reviews. A quick search on “restaurant” only yielded about 100 pages, but they range from Chicago sushi joints to a cocktail bar in Kazakhstan.

The goal of course is to get these businesses to buy Facebook’s new Social Ads, which despite the controversy are ideal especially for small businesses with limited budgets - think about a restaurant targeting only people who like sushi and live in a certain area. If it works well, it could be an improvement over even AdWords. But what Facebook really should do is what BlogBang is doing - let users choose and endorse the ads themselves. Rather than the slightly creepy and probably imperfect behind-the-scenes targeting, they’d be directly tapping into people’s own knowledge of one another’s interests, and picking up the power of word-of-mouth to boot.

I came across an article the other day about a french site called BlogBang, owned by Publicis. It’s set up as a community of bloggers, with just over 2200 members so far. Members get some basic social networking functions - profiles, voting for one another’s blogs etc.. but the real point of the community is to create a forum for Publicis clients to engage bloggers in some participatory marketing.

The more straightforward aspect of this is what the site calls “Diffusion” - advertisers post ads, and bloggers can pick the ones they like and put them on their sites.. they then get paid for click-throughs. So far it’s basically an ad network.. but where it gets interesting is that advertisers can also put out a “Brief” to the community, and members can create and submit their own ads. These then become available for everyone to Diffuse.

This feels more than a little bit like an open-source community, but with graphic design instead of coding as its core skillset. For marketers there’s an extra twist - not only are you getting the benefit of collective intelligence in helping you craft your messages, you’re also implicitly doing research on the perception of your brand among community members.

It remains to be seen whether these types of communities will develop the same mix of altruism and professional pride (or ego) that fuels projects like Linux or NeoOffice. It might only work well for more non-profit, socially desirable advertisers - two of the open briefs on BlogBang are a school and a fund-raising telethon.. but then again maybe not - the biggest BlogBang diffusion to date has been a campaign for Nestle.

The blurring of content and commerce has been going on for several years now. You could even argue that it happened in offline media first - fashion magazines list brands and prices of every item of clothing on every photo, and magazines like Lucky drop the whole editorial pretense and just tell you what to buy.

There are examples of this online of course, but the Internet being what it is, we’ve started to see many more permutations. The Wall Street Journal ran an article the other day about a woman who posts youtube videos of herself discussing and making her latest painting.. if you like what you see, you can go to her site and buy the painting.

Refinery 29 is a fashion site that runs articles featuring the latest hot designers.. but it also has an online virtual “mall” where you can buy items from said designers. Clever, no? But the real genius is that, as you click around their shop, you generate so many more pageviews, which means more ad revenue for them.. we just might be seeing a lot more of this model in the future.