博客空间――产品宣传新阵地

【前言】博客空间――产品宣传新阵地由文秘帮小编整理而成，但愿对你的学习工作带来帮助。Nike Japan has skillfully been running its own popular blog along with its official social-networking Web site, where runners share their jogging experiences wearing Nike’s shoes and using running-aide service Nike+. Spurred in part by the feedbac...

安徽工业大学工商学院英语系陈大为编译

博客，已经存在了很长时间，但是它的主要用途似乎只是用于一些个人对事件、对自己、对自己的粉丝们发表一些满足人们猎奇心理的文章，对于它的商用价值，似乎很少有涉及，在这一点上，精明的日本人又一次走在了潮流的前头。

Plug “Shinkansen N700” into a search engine and back come scores of photos and comments about the smooth ride, dizzying speed and comfortable work areas of Japan’s newest bullet train. The attention is not a coincidence. It’s the result of a publicity campaign by Central Japan Railway Co. targeted at the blogosphere. Last summer, the railway invited a dozen bloggers to a press preview, which included a first-class ride from Tokyo to Osaka. Most of the bloggers returned the favor by talking up the train and giving the railway an increasingly important type of publicity. “Their blogs are so precise, even more so than our own site, and are very interesting,” says Hiroshi Shigeta, a railway spokesman. Ridership for the N700 model, which runs across the country, is up 12 percent over last year, compared with 5 percent overall, which Shigeta attributes in part to the attention of bloggers.

Japanese firms that make automobiles, high-tech gadgets, game software and beauty products have begun to reach out to bloggers in the hope that they’ll promote products and create online buzz. The recognition by commercial firms is just another sign that Japan is becoming a nation of bloggers. Japanese language blogs account for 37 percent of the entire blogosphere, a tad higher than the total blogs in English, according to Technorati. “Personal blogs can be the most powerful media” since it can convey credibility, says Tetsuya Honda, a marketing consultant who runs BlueCurrent Japan. A recent study by Nikkei Research of Tokyo shows that nearly 40 percent of blog readers say they have bought at least one product after reading about it on a blog.

The pioneer in this practice is Nissan Motor. Last year it invited about 100 popular bloggers to its head office for the launch of its new car, Skyline. (A Google search on the event turned up nearly 14,000 Web pages, in addition to the company’s official blog.) One blogger posted a sound file of the “vroom!” of Nissan’s latest engine, along with photos. “Let me show you how cool it is. Beautiful,” he writes.

Nike Japan has skillfully been running its own popular blog along with its official social-networking Web site, where runners share their jogging experiences wearing Nike’s shoes and using running-aide service Nike+. Spurred in part by the feedback it has received from readers of the Web sites, Nike has expanded its new line of running-shoe models from 2 to 20 over the past year.

Fortunately for businesses, Japanese blog entries tend to read like personal diaries or reviews of products, says Nobuhiro Seki, general manager of Six Apart, which introduced blog software to Japan. People talk in detail about what they ate, bought, read and watched on television, and often do so passionately. Nearly half a million blog entries on products (excluding those on politics and social issues) are written each day, according to Blog Watcher. Firms are taking notice now in part because of Web sites that rank bloggers, making it possible to identify the most influential. In addition, in recent months software tools that analyze blog postings for trends and changing preferences have become available for businesses. Blogs are “a frontier of product feedback,” says Ichiro Kiyota, marketing director at Six Apart.

Many firms remain cautious about courting bloggers, for good reason: it can backfire. NTT DoCoMo, for example, was forced to close its own social-networking site last year after its failure to respond quickly to users’ comments led to complaints. But the use of blogs by businesses to promote their products is spreading in Japan. Nearly 15 percent of companies of all sizes have already installed blogs on their Web sites; the number is expected to grow, says Seki. Encouraging bloggers can be a gamble, but when it works, it works well.

在搜索引擎中输入“新干线N700”，你就能得到关于这种日本最新型子弹头列车的大量图片，以及就列车乘坐平稳度、令人眩晕的车速以及宽敞的工作区间的相关评论。当然这种注意并不是偶然的，它是日本东海旅客铁道株式会社一场针对博客空间公关宣传的结果。去年夏天，铁路公司邀请了许多博客参与内容包括乘坐一等座位从东京至大阪的新闻会预展。而作为回报，多数博客对列车给予很高的评价，从而使得列车在博客这种日益重要的媒体上得到了很高的注意力。“他们的博客描述的甚至比我们的官方博客还要精确，而且非常生动有趣”，铁路公司发言人Hiroshi Shigeta说。与乘坐人数总体上升5%相比，行驶日本全境的N700列车乘坐人数去年上升了12%，Shigeta将此部分归功于博客所引起的注意。

那些制造汽车、高科技小发明、游戏软件和美容产品的日本公司都向博客示好，希冀推广产品并获得网上的好评。商业公司的认同是日本日益成为博客国度的又一标志。据Technorati统计，日语博客占整个博客空间的37%，比英语博客总数略高。因为可信度高，“个人博客能够成为最强大的媒体”，Blue Current日本公司市场资讯师Tetsuya Honda说。而最近一项由东京日经调查所做的研究表明，近40%的博客读者表示在读过博客中关于产品的介绍后曾至少购买过一件产品。

日产汽车公司是这种做法的先锋。去年，日产公司邀请约100名颇受欢迎的博客到公司总部参加了新款汽车“天际线”的首发式（除公司的官方博客外，谷歌搜索出了14,000个关于此会的网页）。一位博客除了照片之外，还发帖上传了日产公司的最新发动机发出“轰隆隆”声响的音频文件。“来看看它有多酷。太美了。”他写道。

耐克日本公司则娴熟地运用其流行博客和官方社交网站，在此跑步者们可以分享其穿耐克鞋和使用耐克跑步助手“耐克+”的体验。部分受到网站读者反馈的激励，在过去一年中，耐克已将其新款跑鞋从2款增加到20款。

对商业公司来说，幸运的是，日语博客帖子读起来更像是个人日记或是产品评论，6A公司总经理Nobuhiro Seki说，正是该公司率先将博客软件引入日本。网友们详尽地描述自己吃了什么、买了什么、读到什么以及电视上看到什么，而且常常饶有激情地描述。据Blog Watcher统计，每天大约50万条博客帖子内容是关于产品的（除了关于政治和社会的话题外）。公司现在关注博客，部分原因是现在网站已能够提供博客的排名，这就使得区别有影响力的博客成为可能。此外，近几个月来，商业公司已经可以获得一些软件工具，来分析谈论时尚和喜好变化的博客帖子。博客已成为“产品反馈的前沿阵地”，6A公司市场总监Ichiro Kiyota说。

然而，仍有许多公司对向博客献殷勤表示谨慎，理由很充分：这样有可能适得其反，引火烧身。比如，日本电话电报公司多科莫移动公司，去年就因为没能及时回复用户评论所导致的抱怨而被迫关闭其社交网站。但是，利用博客来促销其产品的商家是越来越多。目前有近15%的大小公司已在其网站上设置了博客，Seki预测这个数字仍会上升。鼓励博客评价产品就像是场赌博，不过一旦奏效，就会好评如潮。

（责编：张楚武）