I am a huge fan of Chris Baggott. Plain and Simple.
Chris is co-founder of a company called Compendium Blogware. Compendium is a brilliant blogging platform that is catered strictly in search, keywords, and acquisitions.From their website:
- Get found online. Blog to improve organic search (SEO).
- Generate demand. For your products or services.
- Humanize your marketing. Build relationships with prospective customers
This morning I read a post from Chris called Business Blogging Lies & Truths. In the post Chris talks about the assumed lies of Business Blogging which is:
The vast majority of your blog traffic will come from search engines. Companies have lot’s of ways to engage in relationships with exisitng customers. Blogging is an acquisition strategy.
But customer generated content in enough volume to drive your progam in to any meaningful ROI? It’s a lie.
I am having a hard time relating the concept of Humanizing Your Marketing when focusing so much emphasis on acquisition and search. I don’t think you can downgrade the concept of internal customer support and conversation driving meaningful ROI.
When a social media marketing or traditional marketing company says, “We want a system that will allow our Chief Blogging Expert to create a post and then our customers will come and comment….all kinds of good things will happen.” This does not mean they are going to have their customers writing content…it means they are involved in the conversation.
Humanizing your marketing means getting involved in the conversation. This means spending time answering comments and suggestions… sending email to the people who commented on your post.
You want to know how to humanize your content? Be Involved.
The last thing I want to see is blogging turned into a marketing machine churning out countless bits of data just to beat a traditional SEO strategy in the Google rankings. AND the last thing I want to see on a blog category are keywords like :
The Best Social Media Marketing Firm in Indianapolis
Why would I ever click that category?
Blogging for search, acquisition, and sales is great but when you focus so much energy and time on search you will slowly begin to lose the human side of your blogging strategy.
I don’t think business blogging or blogging for search is killing the human element of blogging but it isn’t helping people balance both sides of the equation.
Can you find balance? I know we are all trying, measuring, and searching.
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I think about that often…. bringing the human side to marketing is imperative – engaging, commenting , becoming part of the conversation – humans respond to humans. Just some thoughts. Thanks again Kyle
Kyle, I certainly understand your cynicism. It’s hard at times to see through the eyes of the great unwashed horde who Google stuff. Our social media idealism might just stand in the way of sales, which is fine if that’s our choice.
I’m sure by now you have seen the Forrester report out yesterday called: Time To Rethink Your Corporate Blogging Ideas.
http://blogging.compendiumblog.com/blog/blogging-best-practices/0/0/time-to-rethink-your-corporate-blogging-ideas
We are all on the same page. The ‘social’ in social media refers to people. People trust people..they don’t trust brands and they don’t trust institutions. This is what we mean by Humanizing.
But make no mistake. Business (in fact all organizations) survive and prosper by growing. Every activity from making a quality product or providing a quality service to answering the phone to whatever…is all for the express purpose to further the organization.
When I talk about Humanizing your marketing, I’m using this term because everything is marketing.
Now there is bad marketing like car commercials screaming at me when I’m trying to watch the game or spam or spam blogging.
And there is good marketing; like making a great product, providing real value, answering the phone, training the salespeople to solve problems etc…
With blogging, I focus on search because it’s the most tangible, measurable and scalable benefit for an organization. All the other things you talk about are true too…and if you do this well you get those benefits….but if you also gain the benefits we talk about with Compendium you are able to scale that great, engaging content by factors of 100 to 1700 times.
So one can blog using tool X and get 1x benefit, or blog the exact same way using Compendium and get 100x benefit….which would your organization choose?
I think a lot of what Chris says is targeted at attracting new customers, not truly discussing the ins and outs of social media. Most of the copy on his blog seems to be directed at someone who would be searching for a blogging solution.
I think that’s precisely what you’re arguing against. I think that in the end both schools of though will be satisfied from a blogging perspective
What won’t be satisfied by Compendium or any other totally blog-focused strategy is that you absolutely CANNOT ignore social media any more. If you look at modern marketing, the people who use social media are the ‘sneezers’ (as Seth Godin calls them) who will help spread your ideas virally. Am I saying that every company should have someone spending most of the day spreading the message online? Yeah I think I am. It really is that important.
@Chris Good thoughts. I think that you can grow the same way through other avenues online but they are not as measurable as blogging for search.
@Colin Blogging is social media. If you use the right tools and strategies you can help spread your message without having an outside company or employee spending countless hours online. The only problem with what you are talking about is it cannot be measured. The time spent on social media sites pushing information… there is no ROI.
Effective marketing via social media requires a human element. Automated websites have value and can improve business through customer efficiency. However, like face to face networking, you can only build trust when you create a relationship.
At the same time, you can’t build trust until you’ve made the initial connection. Word of mouth is great and we all should strive to offer remarkable products, but you can’t eliminate the need for exposure to begin a business relationship.
In that light, focusing on strategies to increase exposure make sense and are important. At the same time, you’ve got to have a good conversion strategy, and that is where the human element becomes critical.
Make sure your online strategy doesn’t just stop at hello.
Right on Dave. I often feel I’m depending compendium because of it’s extra value on the search side. Of course it covers all the bases that any blogging platform provides…it’s just more.
Colin, as to wwsd? (what would seth do?)
here are some relevant Seth links:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/five-easy-piece.html
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/08/creating-storie.html
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/ode_how_to_tell.html
[...] Kyle Lacy discusses how business can “humanize” their marketing… Humanizing your marketing means getting involved in the conversation. This means spending time answering comments and suggestions… sending email to the people who commented on your post. [...]
Serendipity. This piece couldn’t have been more timely. We are about to go to a board meeting for our small family business to talk about how we can use blogging for both marketing and improved customer service.
[...] Is Business Blogging Killing the Human Element? [...]