Nowadays everybody should acknowledge the existence of blog as an emerging trend in social interactive communication, I’ve came across another interesting academic finding on the usage of blog in this millennium age.  The journal article titled ‘The blog as a high-impact institutional communication tool’ written by Tom Goodfellow and Sarah Graham, from University of Sydney, Australia found that how usage of blog gave higher responses and active interaction among specific target group.

The aim of that study was to maximise the institutional impact of particular event by providing a blog of the event and encouraging interaction with colleagues during the conference itself. the study found that the response from colleagues was very positive. Usage statistics show that a high proportion of the target audience read the blog with many of them using RSS. Some posts also attracted a number of comments, which often produced results that added value to our original posts. The authors of the blog were also surprised to find a high level of interest from the wider community.

For the record blogs are now widely regarded as a mainstream technology. The number of personal and organisational blogs has increased dramatically in recent years (Sifry, 2006).

And the primary reasons for the popularity of blogs can be listed as follows:

1. cheap or free to produce;
2. do not require proprietary software to be installed;
3. do not require specialist computer skills;
4. content can be updated and disseminated easily;
5. readers can get instant notification of new posts using RSS; and
6. comments can be posted by anyone, producing a dialogue between readers and writers.

The study also found that :

1. The overall access rates of the blog are very high;
2. The readership of the blog extended well beyond the target audience;
3. The blog kept attracting hits well after the end of the conference;
4. The blog also gave the opportunity to improve technical and communication skills among colleagues; and
5. The institution focused conference blog to be a highly effective method of harnessing new technology in an innovative way to maximize the impact of event attendance

As for practical implication especially in this country, its about time for any dynamic organization to make full use of blog in term of interacting with its own target group, don’t just depends on organization’s email tool, of which I personally found not effective as some of the email sent went unanswered. For full article you can find it HERE.