MarketingProfs.com

Existing brand health measures rely almost exclusively on survey data to gather their findings. While surveys are insightful, they are also prone to collection errors through inaccurate recall and distorted response by surveyed consumers.

Marketers can do better by creating more-direct and less-biased approaches. Rather than relying solely on survey data, we should find additional methods that seek to analyze consumers' relationship to brands in the field by observing real-world consumer attitudes.

We can start with blogs.
Read the rest of the article here.

The question pops up again from time to time in "the blogosphere": Is blogging journalism? The question has fascinated bloggers and journalists so much that my friend Rebecca MacKinnon -- former CNN Asia bureau chief and present fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society -- helped put together a conference called Blogging Journalism and Credibility (you can read about the purpose of the conference here, and the blog for the conference is here).

My own particular take is that some bloggers are journalists, even if they do not have that professional designation, and it's what and how they blog that makes them journalists. Like "journos" whose work appears on paper or on your television screen, some are good, some are bad and some I enjoy purely for entertainment value.


Click the picture above to read the article.

Ryerson University -- a school in Canada with a well-known school of journalism -- publishes a magazine called the Ryerson Review of Journalism twice a year. The RRJ is created by final-year Ryerson journalism students in the "magazine" stream of the program. The latest issue features an article titled Blogging the Spotlight, which covers the intersection of blogging and journalism and Canadian journalists who also maintain blogs. It's a good introduction for those of you unfamiliar with the overlap of these two worlds.

National Post Business, a monthly magazine included with issues of Canada's National Post newspaper, featured a cover story on the perils about blogging about work in its April edition.

While I would be quick to remind you my own blog played a major role in my landing a job here, a few foolishly or rashly-written words posted to a globally-accessible medium where information flows freely and is easily copied can suddenly make you unemployed. I'm not trying to scare you away from blogging; I'm just asking you to exercise some good judgement.

One Solution: Restricted Categories and Photo Albums

If you feel that you share something with your online friends that might jeopardize your job, Blogware offers restricted categories and restricted photo albums. These are categories and photo albums that are accessible only by users who are logged in and who have permission to view them. You can grant access to restricted categories and restricted photo albums on a person-by-person basis, so you can set up your blog so that:

• Your best friend Alice can see any article or photo posted in any category or photo album in your blog.
  
  
• Your brother Bob can see any article or photo in the "Main Page" and "Family" categories, but not the "Deep Dark Secrets" category.
  
  
• Anyone else -- your boss included -- can see only what you've posted to the "Main Page" category.

I'll post a tutorial with examples on how to set up your blog with restricted categories and restricted photo albums soon. In the meantime, you can consult the Restricted Categories and Photo Albums page of the Blogware Publisher Control Panel Manual.