Non-Line Blogging

Typical.  Just when you think you've cracked this Blogging lark, up pop a load of commentators saying that its all over. In November’s edition of Wired magazine the story is headed " Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004".  Paul Boutin makes the following observation:

“Thinking about launching your own blog? Here's some friendly advice: Don't. And if you've already got one, pull the plug.”

Oh dear.  His point is that the blogosphere, “once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge”.   The serendipity of googling a subject and finding independent writers with a genuine passion for a topic is now a distant memory, Boutin claims.  These days, if you “scroll down Technorati's list of the top 100 blogs and you'll find personal sites have been shoved aside by professional ones. Most are essentially online magazines: The Huffington Post. Engadget. TreeHugger. A stand-alone commentator can't keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day.”

In November’s .net magazine Jason Calacanis, the founder of human search engine Mahalo has..

“...recently quit blogging altogether.  When it started, it was a very authentic conversation and I think it’s now more about marketing, promotion and link-baiting”. 

So there.

And in the UK Hazel Blears, the Government’s Communities Minister had a pop at bloggers at a political conference the other evening:

"Until political blogging adds value to our political culture, by allowing new voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and despair."

But can they all be right?  Is there still a place in our lives for blogs and why should some of us continue?  Here are a couple of reasons why they are wrong.

Firstly, blogs still represent a fantastic digital marketing tool.  There are the Search marketing benefits – lots of lovely, frequently-updated text that robots love to crawl, lots of interlinking so that sites share their “google-juice” and lots of honest keyword phrases that consumers use when posting reviews (and when searching for products and services).  Here’s what Seth Godin says in Meatball Sundae...

"Let me be superclear here:  A post on a blog anywhere in the world could very well rank higher in a Google search than information on the same topic on your company’s web site. Which means your point of view disappears and the point of view of some blogger comes across instead.”

But secondly I think that the positioning benefits of blogging are even more important.  On my digital marketing courses I love to goad people into considering why a corporate blog is a fantastic idea.  First thing is to ask people if they have access to blogs at work – many people have their links to the blogosphere surgically removed by their weasely IT and HR teams...how un-trusting is that?!  Next up I show them blogs.sun.com and that great tag-line

Once they’ve picked themselves up off the floor and wiped the tears of laughter from their eyes, we try and dissect why this is such a brilliant positioning technique:  What words spring to mind about Sun’s corporate ethos?  “Mad” and “Reckless” soon gives way to “Transparent”, “honest”, “trusting” and “credible”...the kind of sentiment marketers cannot buy.  

The same is true for the housing charity Shelter’s blog from their CEO – it is not there to make you set up a direct debit and donate, it is there to show that Shelter is an organisation committed to fighting homelessness and Adam Samson’s blog talks about the work he does with the media, with the legal profession and with local and central Government.  It gives Shelter a brand position and a strong voice in a crowded marketplace.  Not bad for a blog.   

The other day I was trying to develop a “media displacement” model to justify blogs; if we all have the same amount of waking hours to consume news as a few years ago, what is it that would get thrown overboard to make way for reading a blog and the answer could well be, in a business context “trade magazine articles”.  I attempt to munch my way through Marketing, Marketing Week, Precision Marketing, New Media Age every week and also dip into monthly magazines like Marketing Direct and Revolution.  Yet a lot of the stuff is already several days out of date, some of it is not relevant to me and a lot of it is certainly not “best of breed” digital thinking. 

So ignore some 24 year old trade rag journalist trying to find an angle on a search news story and head for some of the great Search blogs out there for the really valuable content (look no further than Matts Cutts for SEO).  And for web analytics we should all be subscribed to Avinash Kaushik’s excellent blog that is better than any month old magazine article. 

So there is still a place for serendipitous search that yields a rich vein of independent thinking in digital marketing...despite what uber-cool Wired journalists think. And if anybody is reading this, I rest my case.