Businesses should not blog, part two
January 10, 2009
Blog technology is fantastic for generating more traffic from search engines, and for engaging with visitors.
That’s good enough for me, and I will always recommend blog technology for a website. In particular, I will shout about using Wordpress, for reasons I must go into soon.
Extra search engine traffic can be considered ‘deserved’, as the content of posts - as opposed to product pages - is usually more interesting, tells more stories and reveals more about the people behind the business shop window. And, google does apply a freshness factor to new content that improves rankings, however temporarily.
But there is a problem with the word ‘Blog’ and the verb ‘blogging’. They both describe a personal diary function, which is not what businesses need at all. A potential misunderstanding.
Part of marketing is to explain and clarify concepts, and so, if we find a word that confuses, perhaps we should start by using different words.
A ‘business’ should use blog technology, but write more articles. Like this one. Well, not exactly like this one, do your own.
Here’s another reason businesses should not ‘blog’. Know what I mean?
Do you like the word ‘blog’?
November 2, 2008
Those of us who have read lots of blogs, understand they’re populated by both genius and stupidity, in ever changing measures - and often within the same blog:
dot dot dot (insert mean spirited comment here).
Blogs are essentially a human device, and have that human fallibility ‘built in’.
So, enter the commercial organisation - put off by that blogging image, and quite rightly so, because;
- Everyone knows there was never much profit in constantly talking about yourself.
- A crisis in business reputation is often self inflicted (Cue joke with a play on words about the BBC’s ‘Brand’)
So, it’s an easy decision not to have a blog.
Only, people do KEEP ON saying that these blogs have a commercial value to the organisation.
Confusing, isn’t it?
Let’s face it, bloggers claimed the technology before it became truly useful. Now marketers love blog technology, but are hamstrung by the whiff of commercial hari-kari.
So, to get to the point of this post, why not approach the business blog issue with more clarity?
Businesses’ should not have blogs!
Instead, they should have;
- Websites written in a human voice, by humans
- Articles written for the benefit of their existing and potential customers
- Articles that show core business values
- Websites that make it easy to discover anything that may be of interest (everything, or not)
- Websites that work hard to raise and maintain the business reputation and avoid negativity
Oh, and it may suit the business goals to have;
- Website(s) that are exceptionally easy to update and maintain
- A website that allows anyone to contribute - especially your customers, prospective customers, suppliers, industry PR and journalists.
- A website that happens to appeal to search engines, attracting more visitors to relevant content and generating more business.
OK, so we might use blogging technology, and it may look like a blog (doesn’t have to) - but it ISN’T a blog, it’s content management :-).
We can all indulge our blogging selves, for free, on Wordpress.com, but our businesses shouldn’t.
They should have better websites.
The future is not real time, it’s written down
September 25, 2008
This blog site was a way for me to research, discover, record and share my findings on what was a very new subject, way back when. Unified Communications.
But what I discovered earlier this year was:
- There is no real business case for real time Unified Communications, even the best of it, - although there certainly is for Communication Enabled Business Processes.
- The (blog) medium turned out more interesting than the message.
Of course, I wasn’t to understand this until recently, but I had started off in the wrong direction.
The problem with real time communication, is that time is getting more scarce. Tools that promote more and easier ‘real time’ communication have this innate problem that more often than not, the call is not as productive as what you can achieve by writing stuff down instead. Interruption is not scalable.
I should have realised the lessons of the printing press much earlier.
The ability to research, (re - search), discover, record and share - is vastly better when things are ‘written down’ (even video has tags and descriptions these days).Non real time is just fantastically efficient. A one to many technology.
I didn’t waste the effort, as website blogging and software based communications has opened up a hugely rewarding and productive environment for me, my friends and colleagues. I’ll still be writing here about these things, but it will be focussed on the web.
Blogs were 10 years old on Monday
December 19, 2007
I didn’t know that
The BBC pointed it out in this article.
Apparently there are 1.5M posts on blogs per day.
I wonder what the next ten years will bring, as things tend to speed up don’t they?
Build a website in Wordpress, 10 reasons
November 25, 2007
Wordpress open source software used to be just for building blogs, but now its more than good enough to have your website built with.
You should.
For all my friends in small businesses, here’s my reasons.
- Wordpress can be used to create a website from scratch with no coding (with a little reading)
- Anyone can add pages, and this means more content, and more updates (no charge)
- Search engines care very much about content levels and how often a site is updated.
- Content is preserved, even when changing the look of the site (Thats what this Wordpress Content Management System actually does)
- Change the look, and all pages are updated, there’s no hard-coding. A website can live and breathe.
- Thousands of developers are working to simplify all sorts of advanced capability - e.g. Search Engine friendly stuff, statistics management! audio and video embedding, database and e-commerce functions.
- If you get stuck, any Wordpress contractor can pick up where you left off - easily
- It is a major bonus for a website to support RSS and blogs, for marketing, and with Wordpress, such rich functionality is built in of course.
- Websites are tons better when interactive - positive customer comments build trust and credibility and will increase conversions from visits to contact.
- It’s free to use
Forget the word Blog - just think of this as a way to replace that old website that looks like a brochure and to start a conversation in your marketplace, and hit those search engines.
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