Here are some thoughts provoked by the latest
BlogShop that I announced but did not really talk about last week.
First, like I already mentioned,
Varzonovtsev,
Peio and also
Ivo have already shared their thoughts on the use of corporate and personal blogs. Their entries summarize their presentations: Var's about corporate and Peio's about personal weblogs, respectively. Unfortunately, there is no written record of
Elenko and Bobby Kandov's presentation on media weblogs. The only written record of it, are my notes (spelling mistakes and coffee stains included). All three presentations and the Q&A session were pretty good, I thought. If I had to do it again, I would have picked only one type of blogs to talk about as there was simply no time to cover all three we'd chosen. Also, the forum was largely attended by IT-people representing their companies...so perhaps we should have left personal blogs out of the panel. But that's ok. Peio is always fun to listen to, so, yeah.
As the seminar is long gone and most conversations on the topic have already died out, I would like to draw some attention to three points that all of the authors implicitly agreed upon but have not really mentioned explicitly in the presentations I just referenced.
1] It is generally a good idea to know WHY you have a blog. What is its purpose? What is its goal? When I say goal, I really don't mean anything too specific. Your goal depends on your blog (corporate, media, personal). Your goal could be to hike up your sales, attract new clients, lower your client communication costs, gather an audience, stroke your ego, find your future husband, whatever.
2] It is difficult to define whether a particular blog is "successful". Traditionally, a blog's success is measured by the number of unique visitors it attracts and the number of links that lead to it. Those metrics, however, albeit not completely meaningless, are not always relevant. To measure whether a blog is successful is really an exercise in evaluating how completely it is achieving its predefined goals. 'Evaluating how completely it is achieving its predefined goals' does not relate to a straighforward technique of evaluation. However, the larger point remains that one needs to first and foremost know why a blog was created to begin with before beginning to judge how successful it is.
3] Time and timing are important factors to the development of a blog. It takes time to start it up. It takes time to keep it up. It takes time for your blog to get noticed. It takes time before you figure out what the fuck you've gotten yourself into. At the same time, you are expected to move fast, deliver stories pretty frequently, respond to reader feedback as soon as you can.
I realize that these three points are pretty obvious. However, I think it is important to keep them to the forefront for many reasons. As we go through our personal blogging routines, I think we all tend to compare ourselves to the best and brightest out there. That, sometimes, works as a motivating factor. We push ourselves to create unique content that others can relate to and that gives an amazing sense of personal fulfillment that's difficult to describe. Other times, however, it makes us give up and feel like total blogosphere failures (oh! the horror!).
As a clinically certified blog-addict, I tend to get all kinds of people excited about starting to blog. They write for a couple of weeks, enthusiastically at first, but the number of entries inevitably starts to decrease. Before you know it, what had started as this new exciting thing, turns into an awful disappointment. And that's clearly not something anyone would like experience. For that reason, I think those three little things I mentioned above are helpful to remember.
Labels: blogging, netage
