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With the voting lines now closed for the Irish Blog Awards, we are now eagerly awaiting discovering who the shortlisted blogs are in all 21 categories.

Participating in awards is a great way to build awareness of your own business and also discover and learn about other Irish businesses who are blogging.

I personally believe that business blogging is an untapped marketing strategy for Irish businesses. As I reported back in December, there are no business blogs authored by the top fifty Irish Companies. Yet there is compelling evidence in research that blogs are a medium trusted by consumers over and above advertising and email marketing.

So where are all the Irish Business Blogs?

What can we do to encourage Irish companies to develop a business blog?

That is where the power of collaboration and creating case studies of successful Irish business blogs can play it’s part.

So enter stage right the nominees for the business blog category of the Irish Blog Awards.  What better place to start to collate case studies on the potential impact for your business if you develop a business a business blog?

Today I have invited all the nominees of the business blog category of the Irish Blog awards to collaborate in a project where we collect best practice in Irish business blogging.

With their help we will create a short report that features the collective learnings of our experience in business blogging.

We will be able to then use that report to share our experience with other companies who are considering developing a business blog. My vision is that we can use the report to help inform and inspire other businesses to consider blogging as an element of their marketing and media strategy.

It will be our way of giving something back to the Irish blogosphere.

Of course there may some Irish business blogs who were not nominated in the Irish Blog Awards or were not aware of the awards. So if you have a business blog here in Ireland and would like to share your experience with other, do contact me and I can send you the survey to complete and I will be delighted to include you in the second phase of the project.

And watch out in the Irish Times for an article about the current state of the Irish blogging nation which will coincide with the announcement of the Irish Blog Awards in early March.