Marketing Ninja

In my previous entries on Blogging for Business I’ve shown that blogging is not a fad and dipped into some basic ways on how blogging can help your business.

Today we are going to discuss what blogging is and is not, and how this applies to the way you run your corporate blog. There are a lot of common misconceptions about blogging and we’re going to clear them up.

What Blogging Is Not:

A lot of businesses think about their websites in terms of readers and content. This is the old model.

In the “content and readers” model, you have a company that writes copy, publishes it, and readers who read it. There is no interaction, there is no discussion, there is simply one group who writes the copy and one group who reads the copy. This model is going the way of the dinosaur, although many businesses don’t know it yet.

A blog is not a static website with readers; it’s an interactive discussion with an audience. You, the blogger, are simply the one who poses the first question.

Blogging Defined

Darren Rowse, the blogosphere’s authoritative expert on monetizing blogs (he is a full time professional blogger), has a list of what defines a blog available on ProBlogger. I’m going to add my own definition to his list:

Blogging is discussing an issue across Internet. Bloggers are the conversation’s participants, readers are the passive listeners, and blogs are simply the transcripts of the conversation. The conversation spans across multiple blogs and many bloggers, leaving a trail of comments and trackbacks to lead the most interested readers to the questions and answers.

Let’s touch on a couple of key points about how blogs are different from traditional websites.

• Blogging spans multiple websites because that’s how conversations evolve naturally; a single blog will never have all of the possible answers and questions, so its up to other bloggers to help mature the conversation.
• Blogging is dynamic; comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks are constantly adding new pieces of information to the conversation. Think of blogging as a real-time news paper where all of the readers are skeptics and supporters arguing their side of the issue and their arguments appear right below the article as they are made.
• Blogging is populist and thusly limitless; there are no elite media gurus who dictate what will and will not be written about. Anyone with an Internet connection and a Wordpress.com account can run a blog on whatever they want, thus blogging can be any conversation on any subject.
• Blogging does not operate on a schedule; publishing with a blog tool is fast an inexpensive and thus new elements to the conversation are published at will and in real time. In addition comments to a blog can occur at any time.

There are tons of other ways in which blogs are different from traditional static corporate websites, but the points I made are the most pertinent in regard to Blogging for Business.

Just remember, blogging is about being part of the conversation, and eventually, beginning and directing the conversation. It’s not about keeping users locked on your site, reading your content; it’s about creating and nurturing reader participation. If you take measures to prevent other bloggers from participating in your blog’s conversations, you are setting your company blog up for complete and total failure.

Further Reading:

• ProBlogger.net: Blogging for Beginners
• WordPress: Introduction to Blogging
• Blogger: What is a blog?

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