How important is your blog?

I continue to have some difficulties with clients who do not understand that their blog is more important than their web site and that said blog should be the hub of all their social media activity.

The San Francisco blogger who landed on the front page of the Financial Times would probably not have received that distinction, no matter how badly her house had been vandalized, if it had not been for the fact that she named the private home rental company in a post about her horrible experience. It so happened that the company is in the middle of attracting millions in new investment and search engines being what they are . . ., the blogger’s post popped up!

That’s where you need to be, dear client! No, not with a vandalized home and not even necessarily in the Financial Times (although one could do worse!), but on the first page of a Google search. Your blog is far more likely to get you there than your web site.

The “Best of the Blogs” – Really?

So, I knew, when I saw this title, that I had an “industry focus” (commercial real estate) newspaper section in my hands and I was thus not expecting blogs about teacups, South African safaris, kale farming, Norwegian fjords or peanut butter sandwiches.

But, come on now – this is what the top commercial real estate professionals in Atlanta blog about?

First of all, there is only one woman among the top 10. And her post is a promo for Publix supermarkets. No problem with Publix – I shop there all the time – but couldn’t it have been more topical (curbside shopping) and less commercial?

The bottom of the “top ten” – that very last number ten – had had the most page views (2,084, after its April 4, 2011 posting) and was the only one that interested me: “How Atlanta looks to the world”. But I immediately disagreed with a major premise: “Visionary leadership that has planned and prepared the area for growth” . . . Really? Any day now, when I look in the dictionary for a definition of “sprawl”, I expect to see “Atlanta” and little else.

Seriously, when I was more interested and involved in “international” than I am today, my global interlocutors who were weighing Atlanta as a site for their U.S. headquarters and ended up on the negative side uniformly cited two problems they saw: traffic and education. Traffic (read: “sprawl”), in the past two decades, has not improved. And education? Well, we now have that debacle in black and white also.

Anyone remember Atlanta’s plans for the Secretariat of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)? Traffic and education killed that dream.

Getting back to blogs – if they don’t inform, entertain and engage, who needs them? Industry focus or not.

When you blog . . . (three cardinal rules):

Your readers will have to become convinced that you know what you’re talking about (or they won’t come back for more).

Your readers will have to become convinced that your motives are pure, that you want to inform (a new tomato sauce recipe, review of a new tech gadget you have tried and like), entertain (make them laugh, or at least smile and nod their heads), and engage (your readers become aware that you truly care about them and want to hear back from them); if your motivation is to sell . . ., you’re losing readers!

Write clearly and with conviction, with proper grammar, spelling, punctuation and syntax and without hype, jargon, self-promotion, clichés or verbosity.

That’s all! See how easy it is?

Blogging

I was recently encouraged to follow the blog of an expert on ethical leadership. The encouragement came from a respected source, so I decided to take a look. For 2010, the blog has a total of four posts, the most recent one in early May.

This does not mean that the blogger does not know what he is talking about.

However, anyone who decides to share his expertise via a blog owes his readers more than four posts per year.

How often do you blog? At least once a month, I hope. Your readers deserve it!

Is Blogging on the Decline?

Hardly, it seems. More than 144 million of us have blogs and many of us post frequently.

Technorati reported last year that the typical blogger is male, between 18 and 44 years of age, more affluent and better educated than the general public.

While there is a plethora of blogs that are essentially public journals, satisfying the writers’ creative needs, the trend is toward serious business blogging. There will always be people who claim interesting niches and find a large readership; their blogs become sales platforms for their products, services or events.