How Business Blogging Changed Digital Marketing in 2004

If 2003 was the year blogging built its infrastructure, 2004 was the year it earned mainstream legitimacy. A handful of moments this year pushed it from a marketing curiosity into something executives felt they needed to have an opinion about.

”Blog” becomes the word of the year

In December, Merriam-Webster named “blog” its word of the year, based on the volume of dictionary lookups for the term throughout 2004. A word only earns that distinction once enough ordinary people, not just early adopters, are encountering it regularly enough to need a definition. That alone told marketers something about how far the format had traveled beyond its niche origins.

Corporate bloggers become recognizable names

Individual employees blogging under their own names at large companies started drawing real outside attention this year. Robert Scoble, a Microsoft evangelist who’d been blogging since 2000, became one of the most visible examples: a company employee writing candidly, sometimes critically, about his own employer’s products, and building real credibility with readers precisely because it didn’t read like official messaging. Sun Microsystems went further, encouraging employees broadly to blog and having its president, Jonathan Schwartz, publish under his own name. These weren’t polished press releases. That was the point.

Political blogging matures past one campaign

Howard Dean’s primary campaign had shown in 2003 that a blog could organize and fundraise at scale. By 2004’s general election, the major campaigns had absorbed the lesson and built out their own blog-driven online operations rather than treating it as one candidate’s experiment. For marketers, the takeaway shifted from “look what one insurgent campaign did” to “this is now a standard part of how any serious campaign, and by extension any serious brand, reaches an engaged audience.”

The tooling catches up to the ambition

Blog search and tracking kept improving through the year, with Technorati indexing a rapidly climbing number of active blogs and giving marketers a rough way to see what was being said about their industry or their brand in near real time. Combined with RSS adoption accelerating, thanks in part to Firefox’s Live Bookmarks feature shipping in November, a blog post was no longer an isolated piece of writing sitting on a website. It was something that could be found, subscribed to and tracked.

What this added up to

None of these four developments were, by themselves, a mandate for every business to start a blog. Together they closed the gap between “interesting experiment” and “channel serious companies use.” A dictionary had recognized the term. Employees at Fortune 500 companies were blogging under their own names with visible business benefit. Political campaigns had proven the organizing power at national scale. And the tools to find, subscribe to and measure blogs had caught up to the format’s growth.

Businesses that started a blog in 2004 weren’t betting on an unproven idea anymore. They were catching up to a shift that had already happened around them.