Bud Gibson Update On Michigan (Ross) Business School Blogging Bootcamp

Bud Gibson has an impressive post that sums up the results of the blogging bootcamp at the Michigan Business School. Lots of good stuff in Bud’s post including some fine points on PageRanks and search engine optimization. Bud’s post opens with the following:

From May 10 through June 23, 2005, we ran the first High Octane Blogging Bootcamp for 33 MBAs at University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.  Our client for the bootcamp, Coach’s, served the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan market for disaster cleaning and restoration services.  Recent surveys indicate that over seventy percent of consumers search the web when shopping locally for services such as Coach’s.  We wanted the bootcamp to demonstrate how Web 2.0
technologies like weblogs and RSS could help better establish a
company’s search presence to take advantage of this channel. To really
push the idea, we informally set a goal that bootcamp participants’
team weblogs outperform Coach’s site on searches for its own keywords.

Great alignment of consumer purchase process with effect of blogging on search engine optimization. Bud wraps up with a key implication of blogging (in the small business segment):

The bootcamp results demonstrate that with moderate but systematic
effort bloggers can achieve search visibility that outperforms
established local players for relevant searches.

Bud also gives some other plugs for blogging as an alternative to websites and traditional paid search:

• Consumers tend to click on “natural” results like those produced by blogging eight times more often than they click on paid search results.
• Easily updated blogs allow companies to adapt to changing market conditions.
• Blogs allow opportunities for customer service and interaction that do not exist with static web sites.

Although I can’t say I’m an expert on the numerics associated with the first bullet point, I wonder whether this type of stuff is the sign of a fall of Web 1.0 Advertising Industrial Complex (re-adapting a phrase coined by Seth Godin). The mix of blogging, rise of blog readership, RSS ads, sponsored bloggers, sponsored posts, measurement tools, and auction markets are changing the landscape.