The Blog is Dead, Long Live the Blog!

Let’s face facts, love it or hate it 2009 has been the year micro blogging hit the main stream. The art of cramming your content into 140 characters is now a national pastime rivalled only by condemning MPs and binge drinking. However, while we are all tapping out our (often) irrelevant updates, we have forgotten about the granddaddy of the social web, the blog.

Robert Scobel and other tech commentators would have you believe the blog is dead. But they are wrong, and if your business is ignoring them then you are probably missing out.
I’ll prove my theory here and now; you are reading this on a blog. Sure you may have arrived here via a Tweet or search, but the content is a blog.

I like to think a great business web presence has three core areas, information (content), involvement (audience) and humanity (real people). In my view the blog is the perfect glue to hold all of this together.

Information – Content
The days of having a solely marketing-laden site are over -- your customers expect more. Your content needs to be interesting, useful and relevant, otherwise it won’t even register. We all need to be in the content business, content is everything.

Involvement – Audience
I have sat through countless meetings where the ‘user’ is debated constantly. Providing relevant site information for your users is common sense, but it’s also vital for these users to be engaged where they most expect it.

Involvement is one of the core principles of blogging. The obvious example is allowing open comments on your content; it’s a clear message that you listen.

The second point about your expected audience is that they may not even be visiting your site. You need a plan for this, and the simplest answer is to distribute and aggregate your content.

Distributing content via a blog is simple. Allow people to subscribe to your posts in a variety of ways, RSS and Email are obvious starting points.

If you have a good content distribution model your posts will eventually be aggregated via other sites such as Facebook or Digg. They might be ‘Tweeted’ in Twitter or ‘liked’ in FriendFeed. You need to encourage this, but the core objective is to get people back to the source, your blog.

Humanity – Real People
Your company twitter feed may broadcast what Mike the Engineer had for breakfast, but while personal it doesn’t do much to advance the company’s agenda.

Instead, cold hard facts about your products and services should be brought to life by applying a personal viewpoint. This also proves your business is staffed by humans. Add to this interaction with customers and developing working relationships online, and a real community can be built.

Setting up a blog is easy and the benefits obvious. Sadly I speak to many people that are being turned off blogging by the view that micro blogging is the replacement. Taking this view will miss the symbiotic relationship between the two. Realising this can make both more productive.