If you want your business and your customers to benefit from the communications power and explosive growth of blogging, it would be a good idea to get your arms around some of the major issues associated with this wonderful way to connect with customers, suppliers and referrals, create knowledge and increase your batting average in the marketing game, all without increasing your overhead.
How new is all of this? Probably, it's really new to you, which is why you are a regular reader of the Duct Tape Marketing Channels. You want to get smarter faster and that is our commitment to you--to do all we can to speed you right along on your "more customers and more profits" goals. Go back over the past five years and you will find some great blogs and conversations about blogs.
Some talk about blogs as a new form of journalism or citizen journalism. If that interests you, look closer at Weblogs and the News --Where News, Journalism and Weblogs Intersect.
Perhaps you are the type of blogger who likes to listen to music or podcasts through the speakers on your computer while you work. If so, balance your enthusiasm for blogging with some reality checks that go back 50 years, as you listen to National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation on August 2, 2005.
In that broadcast, the important questions go out to all bloggers: What do you add to knowledge? What new sources do you have? What standards do you use? How do you handle the struggle for objectivity that defines news organizations, which have editors and fact checkers?
Let me ask you this. How can you beat the Washington Post and Deep Throat? Now there is a great example of additional knowledge and great sources-- on a daily basis.
Some of the best blogs are done by journalists, on their own time--not a part of any paycheck or assignment for their news organization. One journalist's blog worth bookmarking is Contentious by Amy Gahran: Content Strategist, Info Provocateur. In her Sept. 1, 2005 posting, she shines a bright light on a new breed of online kudzu--fake weblogs with no content of their own. Will these sleazy content scrapers scatter like cockroaches or just stand there and look into the light Amy throws on the subject? Even worse, will they think it's a spotlight and break into song and dance? Naawwww! That would call for creativity and something original, which they don't have.
My money is on the customer. They are smart and getting smarter with every turn of technology, every new blog, and each exposure to value or crap. The customer is like a heat seeking missile on the value proposition and they love to exercise their power with the click of a mouse. Click on this blog's RSS reader to keep it in view. Click off a website that offers no immediate answers to their questions. Click on anything that provides an immediate way to find for their business a customer, a referral or a better source of materials or services to boost their brand and their income.
One last thought about blog spam. It won't last. What lasts are principles, values and standards. Nearly 100 years ago, Walter Williams, the first dean of the first school of journalism wrote the Journalists Creed. As a journalism student at the University of Missouri, I had to memorize it and then live by it. Thousands of us did--and still do. There is no wiggle room for fake weblogs in there.
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