What Should A Blog Be ?

Here are some thoughts about what a Blog should be. I saw this information on another Blog earlier this month and thought the information may be helpful to anyone starting to Blog!

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Blogging is not about declaring to the world how much you liked your soup at lunch or your innermost feelings on the benefits of the loofah. Blogging is simply an efficient means of sharing information or, as a reader, of discovering valuable information.
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For our purposes when you see the term blogging, replace it with electronic self-publishing -- because that's what blogging really is. The cost to publish to world-wide audience is effectively zero. Talk about control of the means of production!
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Bloggers are amplifiers -- blogs compress the time in which a story becomes part of national or industry discussion.
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Blogging is a form of persuasion and a shortcut to credibility. Blogs cannot effectively be used to say, "We’re great, they suck." (Hat tip Robert Scoble). Instead, quality blogs must give the complete story – or at least as much as is known at the time. Thus, trackbacks, comment fields and linking are as important to blogging as are your brilliant thoughts and witty prose.
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Blogging constitutes a new form of decision-making. Expertise location, i.e., knowledgebase management is antiquated. If you have a problem, you don’t want a database; you want a person or conversation that can help – hence the growth of the blogging medium. Herein, of course, lies the implications for business. People are using blogs to discuss and debate everything from politics to Chapstick.
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Meta tools, such as Technorati and PubSub -- enable us to see what conversations are taking place -- who is linking to who and what they're saying as well as each link’s relative influence in the form of other links. This enables one to effectively manage the overwhelming avalanche of information and to separate insight from dross. We also happen think these tools have tremendous implications for the market research field in particular.
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The customer is in control. An interesting and well-articulated customer experience could become literally millions of brand impressions almost instantaneously. Mike Kaltschnee of Hacking Netflix was in attendance. Visit his site and you'll see that the customer is not “something” to be controlled, but is someone who will pretty much do and say what he or she pleases, so you had better be nice, damn-it.
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More and more, businesses run on events, not data. As a market research guy, I'm not sure I agree with this entirely, but thought it was interesting. And it is obvious that events are playing a larger role in the destinies of companies than they did only a short time ago. The disconcerting thing, of course, is that we cannot control of events -- only our reactions to them.
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We are moving into a third-generation of information gathering (via Salim of PubSub). From sending (e-mail) to searching (Google) and now to watching -- naturally, using PubSub.
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Blogs can prove loyalty and influence -- via links and track backs. This makes them a potentially revolutionary marketing vehicle. (Jill Griffin of Media Contacts, pointed out, however, that the lack of editorial control can be disconcerting to major advertisers.)
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If we make advertisements that people want to see, they will share them willingly (via Scoble). Burger King’s Subservient Chicken was given as an example. Our recent post to Hitachi Rocks is another. Scoble even said that he himself was an ad for Microsoft and the people willingly link to him without an interstitial or other interruptive "sponsored by" event being necessary. Better yet, Bob Garfield reports in Ad Age that people in Poland are actually paying to share bawdy commercials delivered via mobile phones.
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The best way to learn about your product or service in the blogosphere is by thinking like your customer. And, if you want to collect information about your product or service online, realize that your customers may not discuss your product or service specifically by name.
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Have a blog ready to go in the event of any major crisis (Hat tip: Steve Rubel).
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People not only want, but need both sides of the conversation. Blogging succeeds because it is an efficient process of sorting through information that closely mimics how decisions in a less efficient, but reliable off-line world. Good blogging (i.e., linked) is not opinion -- but point and counterpoint -- leaving the reader to efficiently understand what's happening and make a decision on their own.
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All of this has applications for market research reach beyond the obvious benefits associated with access to nearly unlimited amounts of low-cost or free quantitative and qualitative data. For example, there are opportunities great untapped for recruiting and leveraging online thought leaders for applications such as innovation and crisis management. ThoughtCast anyone? Somebody from Cymfony said "the web is a giant online focus group." I agree, but would add one word--never-ending.

Posted by Goodmind on May 9, 2005