Blogging Advice

All we need is a blog and then our customers will once again begin to trust us and buy our products.

Last week over at the Squarespace Blog I wrote about blogs being perceived as the “Silver Bullet” for companies’ troubles. The line of thinking goes that you hear a new technology being hyped up and the media begins to jump onboard then it must work because hype and media can never be wrong. Well then let’s just say that two things are not right with this.

1. Blogs aren’t really new at all. Maybe the name is newer than “website”, but this is all they are, websites. You don’t think people were publishing their own websites before MovableType came around?
2. The media is hyping up the technology for the wrong reasons.

I will stay away from #1 for right now and focus on #2.

When I say the media hypes up blogs for all the wrong reasons it is because it seems they still don’t understand them. Of course they see them as competition because blogs break news much faster than the larger media outlets. But really that’s like Wal-Mart viewing Mom and Pop stores as competition. In any case one of the most over-hyped type of blogs that I have seen as of late are political blogs.

Some larger media outlets seemed to think that blogs could change the face of politics. This was proven wrong with Dean. Then guess what? It was proven wrong again with Kerry. Blogs don’t really change anything at all sorry to say, though we were sad to hear of the fall out after the election.

A blog isn’t going to change the message of politicians or the platform they stand on. A blog doesn’t change voting patterns in the past and it doesn’t make up for any scandals that may have occurred. On a blog all they can say are the same things that are said in a meet & greet, yet for some reason people tend to think that a blog changes the message and will make it stronger. It doesn’t.

If that’s the case then why would any company be interested in such a thing? We are seeing companies that read some article mention of blogs and how it has made X company more popular and they think it is the magic formula. But it doesn’t always turn out that way.

Blogs help to spread really bad and really good news rather quickly. Mediocre stuff is left to the big media outlets and their bureaucratic publishing processes. A blog isn’t going to magically change the way your customers feel about what you sell. But it can help you guide that change, and it can do it on your timetable.

The real Silver Bullet is the philosophy behind your company. It’s how you treat your customers. It’s the quality of your products and services. That is the Silver Bullet. Blogs just make that bullet shine even brighter.

Richard Edelman is blogging. Or should we say, “business logging” 🙂 He is the CEO of the Edelman PR agency, and is attempting to bring a voice and vision to his company with a weblog. But does he succeed?

I write this on the plane en route to India, which I will report on later in the week. Today’s subject is not a happy one. My friend and former colleague, Gus Weill Jr., age 42, took his life three weeks ago in New York City.

— Richard Edelman

[Read more…] about CEO Blog or Journal?

We love blogs. That is not a secret that we have as we make it known on a regular basis. What we love about them is the open feedback model. Discussions that take place can be so beneficial to the organization because it usually provides an opportunity to learn directly from your audience. We can’t tell you the amount of knowledge that has been passed on to us by our readers and it is all because we allow comments on our site.

The downside of having an open comment system is that sooner or later, if your site is fairly popular, you are bound to get spammed. Spammers harness the power of blogs and especially Google’s love of blogs to hit blogs constantly with spam attacks just to up their rankings in the search engine.

Glaser Online has an article titled, Bloggers Declare War on Comment Spam, but Can They Win? This article goes into the struggles that bloggers and makers of blogging software have encountered dealing with spammers. There are plenty of solutions available to combat spammers, but one solution — turning comments off — will cost a site (and a company) more than having to spend resources to moderate comments and deal with comment spammers.

The problem with comments, open forums, e-mail discussion lists and other user-generated online content is that it takes work — usually a moderator or trust system — to make sure the comments stay relevant, clean and spam-free.

The thing is, this takes work. To everyone reading this entry let me inform you now that if you want a successful site it is going to take work. The problem isn’t the comments, it’s the people who don’t take the time to read comments on their own sites and allow spammers to hit their sites.

If you continue to read the Glaser article you will see some relevant information, but nothing really new until you reach the part where Dave Winer starts to speak. This is the same Dave Winer who knocked 3000 bloggers out of commission not too long ago (now fixed) and for some reason Glaser labels him the “Godfather of blogging.” In any case here is what Dave thinks about comments:

“I think a blog is a publication, and publications have proven that letters to the editor are useful,” Winer said. “But blogs with comments are not letters to the editor. Letters to the editor are edited, they’re selected, and that selection process is a very important aspect of it.”

Instead, Winer thinks commenters should simply run their own blog if they want to comment.

I can only assume that Winer has formed this opinion from his personal experiences, but don’t let his view, however “informed” convince you this is always a good idea. If you are unaware of who Dave is and his past exploits, just know that he is one of those people that are either really loved or really hated on the web. This could be why someone of his caliber would be hesitant to include comments on their site.

However, what would happen if someone like Scoble were to remove comments from his site and expect to receive feedback only from other people who have blogs? It wouldn’t be half as successful as it is now because the majority of his site is focused around the ensuing discussions that occur within the comments.

I am not suggesting that comments should be open for every site, but to write them off completely for all sites is absurd.

Comments are the first line of feedback that your company can receive. You may worry about comments that reflect negatively upon your company, but it is better to have those comments followed by great responses by your team than to allow no comments and learn nothing of how people perceive you.

In my last entry Alexander brought up an interesting question of where a blog should be placed in relationship to the company’s homepage. Both 37signals (Signal vs. Noise) and Jon Hicks (Hicksdesign) have their blog on inner pages and not on the homepage.

Is this appropriate?

For these two sites I think their blog placement is perfect because the topics they discuss do not always relate to the company. Their blogs hit wide-ranging topics which a casual visitor who is looking for their services may not be interested in reading about.

However, having a blog allows them a greater chance of bringing in business so placing them on a totally separate domain would hurt them more than help them I believe.

With regards to our site, the subject matter that we discuss integrates perfectly with what our services our. Therefore, we found it much more appropriate to make the homepage a blog.

So to answer the question of where is the appropriate place to put a blog it depends on the topics that are discussed on the blog. If they venture to far from the core services that your company is offering then you may want to place them on subpages. If the blog is nothing but company information relating to your services and products then I think it is a great benefit to have that front and center.

Before blogging technology, we would all create websites that had their content in place before launching. Now I am finding that many sites that utilize weblogs only have the blog architecture in place and launch with the overused “welcome” entry.

I believe this is a mistake.

What draws people to sites and has them continuing to comeback is the content. Also, don’t forget there is only one chance to make a strong first impression on readers. Why would you want that first impression to be one entry that contains almost no content with a simple welcome message?

When creating a site that has an integrated weblog, it is very important to launch with entries already written and published. That way, you allow users to come and explore the site which helps them decide right then if they wish to make a return visit. Hopefully the content that you have provided encourages them to return, but you have a greater chance of success now than you did before with the one welcome entry.

After the Google shutdown earlier this week (when all web workers let out a collective *GASP*), our favorite search engine explained what happened on their corporate weblog:

“A very small percentage of our users and networks – most notably, a few media outlets that write about us — were heavily infected with MyDoom, so our systems temporarily blocked their queries. By noon, service for all our users had been completely restored.”

I don’t know about other areas, but here in the metro Washington, D.C. area Google was blocking my queries for about 5 hours – 5 of the most intelligence-free hours of my life. But they dealt with it like a champ and talked directly to their customers.

PR disaster averted, IPO about to explode all thanks to a blog.