- You gotta Blog if you are going to Survive Online
- The Search Engines like blogs better than a website.
- A Blog Is easier to get traffic from engines.
- I can write anything on my blog
- The Blogosphere matters
- A Blog Is about You
- Social Media and Web 2.0 is the future of the web
I have put off writing the final myths because I have tetered back and forth between using the same format and actually scraping this whole thing and doing a whole paid series on it. Seriously, I could do a whole book just on Social Media and Web 2.0.(Which I am, at last a report anway).
But the big empty featured post has been up now a month+ and it sits there at the top of HouseBlogger with its vapid stare.
Thus, I have bundeled the rest of the Four Blog Myths into the following post.
Is Your Blog Vain?
Is your blog about you? Actually a blog is about your reader, and what you can do for your reader.Anything else that distracts from that journey is a potentially distasterous path. You blog is your digital brand.
Digital Types
Your blog at worst is a textual brochure. At best it tells your story. It is your textualized brand that tells your business story that unfolds over the course of your posts.Like a paint by the numbers set, you should know what your final painting will look like before haphazardly painting individual numbers.
The Blogosphere Matters
As I noted in an earlier blog post, modern search is a two sided coin. Web 2.0 search and Traditional Search. Both produce traffic. Only 1 significantly produces sales.
That is unless you live in Geekville USA, where children are born with Blackberrys and an Acronym dictionary (OMG).
Face it, normal society (your buyers and sellers) do not hang out at Technorati or MySpace. They are not on Facebook, they are not Digging, Pligging, or bookmarking del.icio.us. They pretty much don't know, or don't care to know, a blog from a webpage.
My oldest is in high school and might hang out on the web IM'ing (instant messaging), while multi-tasking contacts on his cell phone, and his MySpace. His mom on the other hand, runs across town from work to pick him up from school. Her multitasking is getting dinner on the table, making sure the boy does his homework, while preparing for the next day.
Now, America's mothers (women make the decision to buy right?) are not socializing at Facebook. The real chat gets done at gym, dance, Little League, and Boy Scouts. Are you with me?
The Blogosphere is usually the Water Cooler bloggers more interested in socializing than capturing leads.
Your market is not hanging out online. They are busy living their life.
So what is this Social web stuff?
It is real, but thinking that your social web will be fulfilled thru your blog and comments are a joke and myth.
Web 2.0
My dad loves widgets. When the TV commercial offers the Solar Powered Window Shade Fan Cooler, pops is all over it.
Isn't that what the web is becoming? A bunch of useless widgets (yes they call them widgets, and my blog host Type Pad offers a mind numbing plethora of widgets to litter my website).(side note: until the web, my only experience with a widget was as referenced in my business and economics classes. The Professor would often reference these widgets as pretend units of products in a fictional company.)
These tools or widgets are supposed to offer useability benefits for us and our readers.These are a big part of Web 2.0.
The term Web 2.0 was coined originally as a publicity play after the Internet Dot Bomb of the late 90's. It was what the web promoters chose to help prove the commercial viability of the future internet.
Today, that phrase has come to take on the social & useable aspects of the new web. With new technologies like Ajax and Ruby on Rails,Faster connection speeds, & Moores Law , web applications are becoming more intuitive and more "connected". It has also come to mean Reader defined content.
Certainly, as a Society we are craving connection. However, I think we are foolish if we are to believe that connectivity other than belly to belly will ever "feel" right. Joining a Dating Service was once seen as desperate or loose. Today, many of my single over 40 friends use Match and others to connect with a date/mate. And the net has ushered in this legitimacy. Because as a people we have become desperate for connectiveness.
This is the great paradox of our time.We are more connected than ever, but as a people we are more desperate than ever to connect. However, the search for a mate developes much more of a "starving" crowd than the "urge" to purchase real estate.
Currently, I believe the Geeks tail is wagging Realtor the dog. We have so slipped into a technological exhuberance that it is hauntingly similar to the irrationality that bombed us in 90's.
We crave socialization. In our busy lives, we have lost contact with much of what was held dear in our grandparents world. I am sure the emails and instant messages from the Son fighting in Iraq makes mom and dad feel closer. But certainly they would rather have their boy back home where they can hug and kiss him.
Social Web: What is it Good For?
I fear that as agents adhere to the ideas of web socialization, they are doing less real socializing. If you were to ask someone to wed you, would you email that person your proposal? I fear this online world is an easy way to avoid the risk of real face to face sales rejection. That the web has made us too hep to actually sell.
So you want to get Social? Use the networks to find yourself some clients. Any local organizations or groups in Facebook? Get involved. Just like you might involve yourself in the local Chruch Groups, look for local affiliations online. However, to blog and allow comments is a path soon to dissapoint (if not frustrate from the volume of spam). Use Social networks as your prospecting platform. Your blog as your landing post.
Picking Models
The proponents of the Social web sell blogging by pointing at professional blogger models as proof of success. However looking to Professional Bloggers for tactical help, is like The St Louis Rams football team hiring the St. Louis Cardinal baseball team Manager as Head Coach!
Admiring Dave Taylor, Andy Weibels or the Pro Blogger himself, Darren Rowse is fine. Or even the famous real estate blogs like Curbed as they have much to offer. Hwoever,do they sell real estate? Then why follow their business blogging model?
Yes, technology is a slippery slope. Hanging out on forums, blogs, and multi-author blogs are self gratuitious acts of avoidance from ones real job description if it does not lead to a deal.
Being connected to anyone other than your customer simply is an indulgence you cannot afford as a small business unless that connection makes you money (directly or indirectly). So if your customers are not over in Technorati, or MySpace. They are using Google Search, not Google Blog Search. Because your buyers don't have time to waste. The kids want food. Johnny has Soccer, and Mary has to get over to Gymnastics. Thats where they are socializing-in the real world.
So after all that one might think I am anti blogging and anti Social web. No I am not. And I use blogs and Social networks to bring in thousands of visitors daily into my own and my client websites. But, I use them. Some might find that offensive.
And that is the subject of future posts.
Well said. I spend about 5 hours in the morning on the computer, about half of that reading and then posting. The rest of the day is about face to face, belly to belly.
Posted by: john | May 1, 2007 at 08:28 AM
I agree with you in terms of blogs help webstats and blogs are (not sure why) becoming more important than website for search results. We have a real estate blog at www.bytheowner.com and it is helping search results.
Posted by: William | May 4, 2007 at 06:58 AM