Blogging Advice

This week one of my favorite sites, Coudal, went through a redesign. Part of the thought process that went behind the redesign was whether they should include a RSS feed for their Fresh Signals section. Jim Coudal feared that if he included a RSS feed then people would either stop visiting his site or the content wouldn’t have the same feeling since it would viewed out of context. Both legitimate concerns.

However, whether or not to use RSS on your site should no longer be an option. I believe it has become a necessity if you wish to compete with others in your industry.

In the worst case scenario when using RSS a reader will never again visit your site. Since I am unable to track usage patterns for all RSS readers I don’t know how often this happens, but I can tell you from the statistics from my sites (including this one) the number of visitors goes up monthly even with full content RSS feeds. And even if they do not visit your site again, at least they are still reading your content. This increases the odds that they will link to you from their site or spread the word about your site.

It’s always nice for people to continuously return to your site and understanding the different reasons for them to return is essential to your site’s success. Before RSS, there were three main ways for readers to come back to your site.

• Link from another site or search engine
• Personal bookmark
• Email updates to your audience

For many users today, bookmarks have become useless since we have too many of them. Bookmarks allow for information overload just as easily as RSS does, but the difference is that RSS allows updates through all that information overload. A bookmark gets hidden, but if you update your site then the RSS feed will reflect that and tell the reader its time to view the content.

There are many sites that I keep track of and I will never remember them off the top of my head. I don’t remember all the sites in my RSS reader, but I don’t have to since it does all the remembering for me. With a site like Coudal, since I have not made it my homepage, I often forget to visit the site. Many times I go weeks without visiting, not because I don’t like their content, but because I simply forget about it. RSS wouldn’t allow me to forget it.

With the plethora of sites around fighting for the mindshare of your readers becomes essential. Why lessen your chances by not including a RSS feed? That opens the gates for everyone else to increase their readership. RSS feeds create more opportunities and the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

Not every person who writes for their company blog has to be in the marketing department or the engineer who develops the product. The person who does the blogging doesn’t even have to be a part of the company. The real requirement for blogging is that the person has a passion for what they do. Without the passion the words on the blog lack substance. They lack the ability to grab ahold of the reader and convince them that their is a truth behind them.

We are working with a company that plans on using our Blogging Services and we know that if we use someone that isn’t passionate about their product then the success of the project is in jeopardy. Sure it would be simple to get someone who can write some facts here and there about the product, but our goal is to engage the readers. Get them to continuously come back even if they don’t buy the product. At least that way a community develops and quite possibly they will buy a product from the company down the road or at the very least recommend it to their friends.

You can tell when someone is not engaged in their blog because the writing becomes dull. If you cannot even interest yourself to write then you would be hardpressed to expect your readers to have any interest in what you do. By all means don’t force yourself to write just because you feel the need to get something out.

Both Macromedia and Microsoft have a number of company blogs done by the people who develop the products. Many of them are quite interesting solely because you can feel the writer’s excitement when s/he talks about their work. This is the type of writing that engages people.

Passionate writing does not mean successful writing, but it gives your blog a greater chance of success. If you are not passionate enough to write about your product or services then you shouldn’t expect others to be excited about them either.

Over the past couple of weeks I have come across a number of articles proclaiming that “Microsoft is listening” and the majority of these relate to Robert Scoble and the new channel 9 wiki for IE. At first you may think that it is great to hear this, but then you hear “Microsoft” and it is only fair to have doubts. It’s easy to say that your company would like to work with your customers and it is a different thing to actually do it.

Whenever someone mentions a problem, or Scoble comes across an issue that someone has with Microsoft, he vehemently requests that he be given the chance to work with the individual. The issue is the problems that the customers encounter are on products that Scoble does not touch. In fact, Scoble develops none of the technologies at Microsoft — so placing him in the evangelist role requires that he work even harder to understand the technology. Does he pull it off? Well I think it will take him a little more time.

Scoble is the type of person who every day posts a large number of entries relating to Microsoft and other aspects of the technology world that interests him. He doesn’t hide why he talks about Microsoft since he is an employee for them and Longhorn evangelism is now his profession. Reaching out to his readers and asking them how he can help also shows there is a passion to make things better. Again though, he has a lot of work to do because he is working for the “Evil Empire”.

With such a large company quick fixes are not going to happen. So if I put in a request for a new feature in IE and the next release doesn’t come out for a number of years then I am going to feel as though I am not being listened to. I think Scoble would do well to track the changes that are implemented due to customer’s requests and make this information public. Many people become addicted to Open Source software because they see first hand how their request/bug fixes are handled.

You can talk till your face turns blue about how you wish to help out. About how you are extending a helping hand to make your company and its products better. However, until we see the results, how is our opinion going to change? Measuring the success of a evangelism blog is almost impossible so I can’t comment on whether or not Scoble’s style is successful. I do think though that showing us that Microsoft is listening would improve the chance of success. “Saying” will always be a completely different task than actually “doing”.

Placing a blog on your company site with comments and trackbacks does not show you are listening. It shows that you are willing to let your readers participate on your website. Listening to what your readers say and then showing them how their ideas are being implemented proves that you are listening. Blogs don’t take the work out of improving the image of your company. That part is still left up to you.

I don’t know if it’s a fear of blogs or a total disregard for their power, but too many companies are underestimating this medium. I can understand that if a blog only gets 20,000 visitors a month that some companies might see it as insignificant. However, if a major publication or independent publisher such as Slashdot pick up on the story then that 20,000 becomes millions quickly.

If a blog publisher is going to have a significant amount of people going to their blog then you know that they are fairly passionate about what they do. If I am NetFlix and I see a request from a NetFlix blogging site to ask my company some questions then I am surely going to take the 10 minutes out of my day to accommodate their needs.

Being a transparent company or one that claims to cater to their customers is not a selective option. You cannot pick and choose who you wish to give the best customer service towards because everyone should be important. The beauty of what Hacking NetFlix was doing was giving free PR to NetFlix. Word-of-Mouth advertising from loyal customers for nothing. How many times do people come up to your company asking if they can help spread the word? If and when it does happen will you turn them away?

Of course there is a reason to fear blogs if you do all the wrong things. Blogs help to bring out what is really on in the minds of consumers. Maybe that is what NetFlix thought. If that is the case then they already have deeper problems within their organization that need to be resolved.

Blogs can either be your enemy or your best friend depending on the principles within your organization. After reading the entry at Hacking NetFlix I have to question the principles of NetFlix. They are targetting a new niche in the movie rental industry and one where we are passing the early adopter stage so I would think it would be in NetFlix’s best interest to help the early adopters convince everyone else to use their service. This truly was a missed opportunity.