The Empirical Study Of Performance Of Blog Marketing

Blog, i.e., web log, is a typical Web 2.0 application. One of the recent research interests on the blogs is how to properly exploit their commercial value. Unlike the conventional broadcast media, blogs deliver the information interactively. For an enterprise, due to their customized way of communication, blogs can establish a well-founded platform between the enterprise and the customers, and further maintain reliable relation between them. Blog marketing is one effective way to exploit the commercial value of the blogs. Current research trends in blog marketing focus on its connotations and effectiveness. In this work, based on throughout reviews of the related research, we categorize the main influences on the blog marketing into three factors: the design of the blog, the popularity of the blog, and the operating space of the blog. We propose evaluation metrics for the performance of the blog marketing, based on which the three influence factors on the blog marketing are studied.The research subject of this work is business network of Alibaba. Alibaba is a remarkable platform of the blog marketing in China. Among the blogs we have investigated, targeted markets include household goods, industrial production material, health products, clothing, etc. After the survey on this representative population, there are 110 valid feedback reports. Those feedback reports are then analyzed with structural equation modeling (SEM) and simulated with Amos software.Our research shows that all these three factors have significant influences on the blog marketing performance, but to somewhat different extents: the design and the operating space of a blog have a higher influence than its popularity. The difference is, however, not significant, which indicates that none of these three factors can be simply ignored. In the meanwhile, our research shows that these three factors are positively correlated. That is, there are certain correlations among the design, the operating space, and the popularity of a blog. They interact with each other. A positive improvement in one factor can lead to improvements in the other ones, and vice versa.This work provides a reference of decision-making to the enterprises that are conducting the blog marketing. We recommend the enterprises to improve the performance of the blog marketing in terms of these three factors. As the importance of every individual factor is comparable to each other, they should be on equal terms during the process of blog marketing. Moreover, because of the positive correlations among these factors, the enterprises should search a strategic combination of them, subject to the principle of cost minimization, in order to maximize the marketing effect.