Rob Cottingham's blog | Social Signal

So far in this 10-part series, we've seen how blogs can help you give your organization a human voice, gain valuable feedback and create a communications alternative to news releases and advertising. Now we're going to look at how it can help you build relationships with your customers, your public and your team.

A few months ago, I left a conference thinking how great it would be if I could have checked up on the speakers beforehand: not just their bios, but their reputations for delivering engaging, useful and, yes, entertaining talks. From that spun out the idea for a site where anyone could rate speakers and their presentations. My back-of-the-napkin diagrams got pretty elaborate... before I filed them away in our now-bulging File Drawer O' Great Ideas.

It's hard to say which is the more interesting finding in the latest Pew report on what Americans are up to online: the fact that one in 10 online Americans say they use Twitter, Yammer or a similar status-update application... or the fact that adoption declines so sharply with age:

Advertising is one of the chief ways that web sites generate revenue.

But be careful where those ads go. Place them in the middle of your copy, and you may end up with something like what happened with this Vancouver Sun story (I should add, it's through no fault of Twitter-savvy reporter Gillian Shaw's).

So far in this 10-part series, we've seen how blogs can give your organization a human voice, and provide valuable feedback from your customers. Now we're going to look at how they can open up a new communications channel to the world: one where you can tell stories that might not make front page news, but can still move your audience.

Many organizations have only two ways to talk to the public about the issues that matter to them: advertising, and mass media - often through a news release.

Hat tip to the good people at CBC's Spark.

I recently had an email exchange with a few colleagues, sparked by a news columnist's disdain for how two local public figures are using Twitter. And Darren Barefoot, after offering some solid advice, weighed in with this:

Check out any social bookmarking site - Delicious, for instance, or Digg - and you'll see that a lot of the most popular pages being bookmarked have something in common: a number in the title.

A little over two years ago, we sat down with Vancity's Kate Dugas and William Azaroff to help them think through a New Year's resolution contest. Little did we know we were helping to forge a dynasty.