But today, a new development in the cyberworld - blogs - is getting strong and catching the attention of marketers.
"Blogs emerged over the past few years and became big because of YouTube's popularity among Thais, which was about last year," Mahithorn Pongsarat, CEO of Digithais Network Co Ltd, the digital media agency arm of Carat Media Group, said last week. Surfing the Internet, anyone can find weblogs from both blog operators and brand-owners.
Some top weblogs today are xteen.com, BlogGang from Pantip.com, Storythai, GotoKnow and www.oknation.net from Nation Multimedia Group.
Adisak Limprungpatanakij, president of Nation Broadcasting Corp, calculates that oknation.com has already signed up over 10,000 bloggers with almost 60,000 entries.
It gets 3,000 new bloggers each month. Each blog records 17,000-20,000 visitors, based on unique IPs, and 130,000-150,000 page views per day.
With these numbers, blogs have inevitability surfaced on the radar screens of both media consulting companies and marketers. They are now salivating over the thousands of people who remember a weblog's name and keep visiting it to share common topics.
"Having their own weblogs is like owning a specific wide area on the Internet where bloggers can write everything they want, show pictures and broadcast video clips. Then others see them and share their views. And if they grow frustrated with the contents, they can clean up the entire thing and create a new one," Mahithorn said.
"About 40 per cent of our corporate clients show strong interest in the channel and want to keep their own weblogs," he said.
The challenge is that they have to spend big bucks to set up a separate department to oversee all contents to ensure nothing improper is posted and viewer interest can be maintained. Weblog operators can't control bloggers unless they start with an environment that invites cooperation.
"We have created a culture of sharing views on many topics without posting improper words, and all bloggers automatically take care of that. If improper bloggers really exist, they face social sanctions, and I have witnessed cases in oknation.net," Adisak said.
Digithais recommends corporate clients join a weblog that has already earned a good reputation rather than try to create their own, as it can save a lot of money and guarantee a wide audience. Companies have to be very clear in their objectives for owning weblogs. If it's worth it, do it; if not, join others.
However, they have to be very good at disguising themselves as normal bloggers and not use a hard-sell approach.
Successful cases abroad that come to Mahithorn's mind are Nokia and Adidas, which run blogs in MySpace.
Another choice for marketers is to be a part of weblogs.
They can choose popular weblogs and negotiate for space, mainly for banners, to advertise their products or brands.
NMG's oknation.net has already experienced that. Both Nation Group and Digithais confirm that blogging is not just a fashion. The trend will continue for as long as we are in the "user-generated-content era".
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