With the rise of Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites, it might be tempting to rethink the time, energy and resources you devote to your corporate blog. But according to a new study by eMarketer, you would be making a mistake to do so:

eMarketer estimates that this year more than half of internet users will read blogs at least monthly. By 2014, readership will rise to more than 150 million Americans, or 60% of the internet population in the US. One reason for the rise in readership is that blogs have become an accepted part of the online media landscape.

Since when did blogs enter the mainstream? Since it became clear that alternate forms of communication simply don’t provide the potential depth or breadth available in the blog form. But while more than half of people who are online read blogs, less than 12 percent actually write them, according to eMarketer.

Despite the fact that personal blogging platforms have gotten insanely simple to use, eMarketer says that blog writing will remain a niche activity and is only expected to grow 1.3 percent in the next three years. That said, however, the blog form will continue to be an important online communications platform, as media continue to evolve and printed media recedes.

The interesting point made by eMarketer, however, is that as it becomes more widely used and more familiar, the blog will lose some of its luster as the primary way people express themselves online. Facebook and Twitter already are providing an easier, quicker, though shallower, way to express oneself online.

But remember, 38 percent of blog readers are not blog writers, so the form doesn’t appear to be disappearing any time soon.

Eurodam News Blog was recognized by the Society of American Travel Writers at its convention in Houston on Saturday with a bronze Cushman award for best publicity campaign for a single entity or national brand. Whoo-hoo!

NewmanPR has run the blog since June 2007, generating and managing content, handling questions and comments.

Along with honoring excellence, integrity and best practices, the Aaron D. Cushman Travel Public Relations Award recognizes travel PR professionals who excel in their fields by being imaginative, creative and responsive.

Each year SATW presents gold, silver and bronze awards to those who have implemented PR programs and campaigns that have stimulated tourism, educated consumers and supported the community.

The award is named in honor of Aaron D. Cushman who has been a member of SATW for more than 40 years and has held positions on most committees, served as chair of the Associates Council and member of the board of directors, received three Presidents Plates and was named a Marco Polo, which is the highest honor the Society of American Travel Writers bestows.

Now in its 52nd year, SATW is a professional association representing more than 1,300 journalists, photographers and media relations professionals in North America. Members include writers, photographers, editors, electronic media and journalists, film lecturers, broadcast/video/film producers and public relations representatives.

SATW works to raise the standards of the profession, guards the right of freedom to travel and encourages conservation and preservation of historic sites and natural wonders.

Alan Wilson, editor of the Cruise News Daily, wrote a piece about the Eurodam News Blog, which the agency manages, in which he names it the best weblog in the cruise industry. We think Alan has pretty good taste in weblogs:

More Than Just a Lot of Page Views
It doesn’t seem like it’s a well-kept secret anymore. After only being “open for business” for about 15 months, Holland America’s Eurodam News Blog has already passed the one million page view mark.

Since its launch in June 2007, it has continually informed “ship-heads” about what’s new in the life of the line’s newest ship — even before it was a ship. It has evolved to become the best cruise line blog we’ve found on the Internet.

There are several reasons for this. One is that there are dozens of contributors. Many are actually aboard the ship, there are also frequent contributions by department heads, and sometimes even readers who have sailed aboard the ship.

The result is an entertaining mix of types of postings that takes readers behind the scenes on the ship, showing functioning of the vessel, interesting events that take place on board, an occasional profile of a crew member or officer and sometimes simply a “postcard” (picture) from a port of call, which may be a picture of the ship submitted by a reader or a nice shot of a scene from a port taken by a crew member.

Each item is usually only a few paragraphs long and usually includes a picture or sometimes a short video.

Recent items have shown where your call goes when you call the purser’s desk from your cabin, why they paint the name of the ship on the dock, photos from several plaque ceremonies (which occur the first time the ship calls at a port), and special events such as the one you have to see to believe on our Web site at http://www.cruisenewsdaily.com/nf81002.html

The coordinator of the blog is Buck Banks in Miami, and everything filters through that office before it gets posted. Banks and the small group in Miami do an excellent job of editing the items (when English isn’t the first language of many of the contributors, they may need a little polishing to correct spelling or grammar) because each item retains the individual voice of the contributor, and chances are the readers don’t even realize the editing has taken place (which is the mark of a good editor).

Banks is also the one that makes sure the items keep flowing in, and at the occasional times when new ideas don’t flow from the ship fast enough, he comes up with things he wants to know about and asks the ship to send some pictures and information.

When the blog was being planned, the Miami coordination was put into place (as opposed to a variety of people posting directly) because Holland America wanted to ensure the quality of the finished product. Being a premium cruise line, and since the blog was going to represent them to the world (and potential customers), they wanted it to reflect that quality and polish their cruise product has. It was also important to make sure that it was being updated frequently with a variety of topics to keep reader interest.

That has paid off. Not only has the blog, with relatively little promotion, achieved the million page view milestone relatively quickly, but a phenomenal 12% of the visitors are shown to be daily visitors.

Over the last 15 months, the blog has evolved. Originally the blog was created so that the outside world could follow the building of the first of Holland America’s Signature Class vessels. Initially, most of the items were written by people in the corporate shipbuilding department about how ships are designed. As construction began at the Fincantieri yard in Italy, those gave way to the Carnival shipbuilding people at the yard and were accompanied by photos of the actual construction and delivery of major components to the yard. Once the basic structure was there, then there were dozens of photos of the rooms and equipment coming together. Sometimes you’d see something behind the scenes such as the equipment in the galley being installed, and on other days you might see a major piece of art being installed in a passenger area. Readers were taken right along with the ship as it was tested and benchmarks toward its completion were passed.

As crew members arrived in Italy and began to set up their departments, it was easy to sense the excitement through the blog, and the blog had really taken on a life of its own. The sense of excitement continued right through the ship’s christening and inaugural cruise.

Now the Eurodam News Blog has moved into a new phase of its life and is dealing with a ship in normal operation. Holland America spokesperson Erik Elvejord says the company is now considering where they go from here. Nieuw Amsterdam is coming in 2010. Do they start a second blog about its design and building? Or do they merge the two? Or does the Eurodam blog become the HAL Fleet blog with items posted daily from across the fleet? With Nieuw Amsterdam coming, these are decisions that will be made in the very near future.

For right now it’s all about Eurodam, what’s happening, and the Holland America employees aboard it. Check in daily at www.eurodamnews.com for a very interesting read.

It’s not the first, and it likely will not be the last time a corporation breaks the unwritten rules of blogging to make the medium serve its business ends. But this time, it involves a multinational corporation (Coach), a trade group (International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition), an institution of higher learning (Hunter College), a class in public relations and a nonexistent student (Heidi Cee) in a conspiracy to further the IACC’s battle against fake Coach bags.

Adweek covered the details, but the big picture is that Coach gave Hunter a $10,000 grant to get the class to run the scam, a few months later Hunter received a $1 million donation from Coach’s CEO, Lew Frankfort, a Hunter alumnus. My, isn’t that a tangled Web they wove.

Here’s the gist of the scam, according to Adweek:

Hunter College students in New York couldn’t miss the poster plastered around the Upper East Side campus. Reading “MISSING — $500 reward!!” it was accompanied by a photo of a young, blonde, Heidi Cee, pleading for the return of her lost Coach bag.

Tear-off tabs listed Cee’s phone number, blog, MySpace page and Facebook profile. Visitors to the blog (encounterheidi.blogspot. com), which drew more than 15,000 hits after the posters went up, learned that the bag was a gift from an ex-boyfriend serving in Iraq.

One day, Cee blogged that another student had returned the bag. A day later, she wrote that on closer inspection, the bag was a fake and she had been scammed for the reward.

Outraged (”EFFING COUNTERFEIT!” she wrote), Cee blogged that she was researching the world of counterfeit goods. She discovered, she wrote, that they’re linked to criminal activity, child labor and terrorism. She even posted a video to YouTube about counterfeiting, “Break the Chain,” and organized an anti-counterfeiting event on campus that drew a crowd with free food and T-shirts.

Given the proliferation of fake blogs (also known as “flogs” or “flack blogs”), you might think folks would start to wise up. But in this case, which is an instance of “astroturfing,” or a fake grassroots campaign (IACC wants to end counterfeiting of brand names), it’s even more insidious. Heidi Cee’s Coach bag gets stolen, she blithely pays the reward for a fake, and the next thing you know, there’s a campus rally around IACC’s campaign.

There are two lessons here: The first is that as attractive as social media are as potential marketing tools for corporations, transparency and honesty are absolutely essential for corporate blogs; the second lesson here is that one should approach any blog (except this one, of course) with the same skepticism one reserves for the guy trying to sell you a “real” Rolex watch for $25.

Anybody who does it will tell you, blogging is time consuming. We’re managing a blog for a client (Eurodam News Blog) and cranking up this one on our Web site, and sometimes coming up with compelling, pertinent content is difficult.

But it must be ever so much harder for the bloggers covering the presidential campaign. We’re just less than a year away from the elections, and generating something interesting and different in a race in both parties where, aside from poll numbers, hairstyles and accents, there’s not a whole lot of new or different going on.

Gary Trudeau captured that sentiment perfectly in his Doonesbury cartoon strip last Sunday, shown below.

“I wasn’t picking on anyone or any blog in particular,” replied Trudeau, when contacted by Editor & Publisher. “I was just commenting on how many journalists seem to be pulling double-duty now — and wondering what the impact is on quality.”

Hmm, posting a blog post about a cartoon about a blogger who has nothing to post … too self-referential?