Business Blogs Can Be Different

When blogs first appeared they were primarily a means for individuals to share the cool sites they discovered while surfing the Internet. Each day or two the blogger would post a sentence or paragraph describing some neat site he had come across, with a link to the site.

Blog as journal

Within a year or two blogs began to take on a more verbose character, serving as diaries or journals where the blogger could ruminate on whatever subject might be occupying their mind that day. Since bloggers in those days tended to be immersed in the Web, often the subjects that concerned them included web sites -- so there were still links in their blog posts, but they were no longer the sole purpose, and in some blogs not even the primary focus.

About the time of the 9/11 tragedy in 2001 the media began to notice blogs because their posts expressed what everyone was feeling -- the shock, the fear and indignation were a vast reservoir of expression available to journalists without the need for emotional face-to-face interviews and messy man on the street quotes. These were well thought out, often expressive and evocative essays in a format the journalist could identify with -- written text.

Bloggers in turn, realized that their on-line journals were in fact very public -- they were publishers of journals, hence themselves 'journalists' in both senses of the term. This made them take the endeavor more seriously, and attracted other people who felt they had something to say. Of course for every blog with an articulate author there were twenty that were no more than disjointed ramblings of unorganized minds. The latter never got a widespread following and were ignored by the media, but felt they were part of the blog 'community.'

Blogs for business

The media attention soon attracted the notice of business. "How can we take advantage of this phenomena?" they asked themselves. Before long major corporate figures had their own blogs, to 'keep in touch' with customers and shareholders. Small time micro-businesses began posting blogs that hawked affiliate products instead of 'cool sites.' Long time bloggers (i.e. 6 months or more) cried foul -- these intruders were debasing the good character of blogging with their grubby monetary motives! "These aren't blogs, they are PR stunts and advertisements." they said.

Then a funny thing began to happen. Established bloggers began to see that they too could make money by adding a little advertisement to their blog pages. Here and there a banner appeared, and soon a flood of text based ads -- which somehow seemed more in spirit with the notion of blogging. Before long people who never had an on-line business were starting blogs just to sell the advertising space. The line between business blogs and 'pure' blogs became hopelessly obscured by an infinite gradation of commercialization.

Curiously, many businesses stayed on the sidelines, watching this happen, but not coming in to play. Too much effort! Write something every day? What would I say? It's a clique, it's a fad, it's just not worth the time it would take.

Influence of software

All the while, programmers were busy churning out software to make blogging easier, and adding all sorts of bells and whistles to give their software an edge over the others. Most of this software is free, so the motive is primarily to build their own reputations. Those who produce free software are more likely to identify with the non-commercial origins of blogging, so little thought has been given to commercial aptness of most of this software and features.

Here are some of the 'features' commonly found in blogging software, looked at from a business perspective:

Date and time

The 'personal journal' aspect of blogging has been so ingrained that some definitions of 'blog' even mention the fact that posts are dated as a fundamental and necessary feature. But wait a minute! I'm a busy business-person, I won't always have time to post a thoughtful article to my blog, but I don't want my customers to think I'm a slacker when they see the gaps in the posting dates. I don't want to feel pressured into posting when I have nothing to say, or no time to express myself properly. A business blog need not include the date and time!

Feedback and Automatic Live-Linking

Most blog programs allow for reader feedback. Combine this with 'features' that automatically conver URLs into live links, and you have a situation ripe for abuse. And indeed the term 'blog spam' describes an already widespread and well-known problem for popular blogs. Add into the mix juvenile tendencies to trash anything they don't understand, and you can see that the comment section can rapidly fill with undesirable even harmful content, from a business standpoint. Comments are a useful feature, but a business blog should require that comments be approved before posting, and outgoing links should be limited or eliminated.

Ping and Trackback

These features notify you if someone mentions your blog post on their blog, and provides a link back to that post. While this seems useful at first blush, it suffers the same weaknesses as uncensored comments -- do you really want to give a free link from your site to someone who posts a negative comment about you on their blog? When using a blog for business, you want to control outgoing links, so any automated feature like this is less than helpful. Business blogs do not need trackback features.

Blogrolls

With a blogroll the blogger has more control -- it is a list of other blogs with links to them -- but again, you do not want extraneous links from your business. If there is a need to include links, better to post them within a message and include a description so your reader knows why you are recommending that site. Busines blogs have no need for blogrolls.

RSS

Here at last is a feature that is useful for a business blog. Essential even. With the growing difficulties associated with email filtering, it is much better if you can get interested readers to subscribe to an RSS newsfeed than to have them 'join' your newsletter mailing list. There are also additional promotional and search engine optimization benefits to RSS. Business blogs should include RSS.

Summary

The definition of blog is sufficiently obscure that those wishing to create one for business purposes can 'tweak' the features and characteristics to meet their needs. The benefits of blogging for businesses of all sizes are sufficiently great to motivate almost any business to take up the practice of blogging -- modifying the existing paradigm to suite their own needs makes it easy to do so.

Blog Home

Topic List

Archives