Jeremy Wright is known for many things throughout the blogosphere, including some zany antics that have made him famous, such as auctioning blog marketing services off on E-Bay, just prior to launching a blog marketing company, right before the U.S. Border Patrol declined letting him cross for stating that his profession was being a blogger, and of course, the latest, which is getting fired for blogging. This is, of course, in addition to launching the new blogging network, b5media, and his recent book, Blog Marketing.

When first reading the book I experienced deja vu, primarily because I was reminded of many of the blog-marketing methods I wrote about marketing real estate and marketing real estate services using blogs.

Wright says in the book, and rightly so, that blogs create customer evangelists. However, as Guy Kawasaki pointed out to me earlier this year, t-shirts are likely the best tool to enable customers to evangelize you, or your product, but adding blogs to the mix doesn't hurt. Blogs do create evangelists, but the evangelists are typically your readers, and those readers often have blogs, or they may write for a news media outlet (print or broadcast), and you are likely to be quoted for your expertise by these readers, who also happen to blog, and by the news media folks who read your blog.

Of course, if you feature comments on your blog, your customers can write about their positive experiences with you and your company, and, as Wright points out in the book, your customers can spread these positive experiences by communicating them to others via blogs. You can also find out about customers' negative experiences via those comments, according to Wright, and solve a customer's problem more quickly because of a blog.

(I do not have comments enabled on my blog because I am aware that anyone can post anonymous comments that are ill-intentioned and false, and I therefore do not advocate corporate blogs using open comments on their blogs. Wright and I differ on this particular comments philosophy.)

While blogs can easily make you into a thought leader in your field among your current customers, potential customers and the media, they can also turn you into an instant project manager, using an internal blog, says Wright.

According to Wright's book, a project management blog, such as those offered by Basecamp, can offer project managers the ability to more efficiently and effectively keep everyone informed on a project's progress, archive important documents, raise important discussion points and involve all members of the project, or team. This can be done using a password-protected blog, which is important, as most corporate teams do not want most project information divulged to the public, at least until the project becomes public knowledge. Internal blogs can also be used for administrative communication, as well as for internal communication and marketing, according to Wright. Large corporations such as Microsoft already uses blogs for such communication and for projects.

Blogs are also easily tracked by Google, which also provides most blogs with prominent PageRank status, which is another good reason to include blogs in your overall marketing strategy.