In 2005 Bill Gates, founder and currently chairman of the software giant Microsoft, claimed that eventually most businesses will use blogs to communicate with customers, suppliers and employees, because it's two-way and more satisfying. This claim made me think; why would THE Bill Gates, a guy that knows how to earn his money, claim such a thing if there is not a lot of money to be made with corporate blogs?

Fortune 500 companies did not need blogs before to make their overall marketing efforts successful, so why start making use of blogs now? Online marketing has become very popular since the start of the Internet, but with this popularity it also has become more competitive on the Web. 5 years ago online marketing was totally different than what it is today. Companies have to come up with new and better ideas to increase the return on investment of their online marketing activities. Knowing this, combined with Bill Gates's claim mentioned before, made me wonder if blogs are the key to success in the world of online marketing. I decided to do more research on this topic, so I created a concrete question: Do companies need a corporate blog to increase the ROI of their Online Marketing efforts?