Have you read the latest D.C. gossip at Wonkette? Get your political news at ABC’s The Note or at Daily Kos or The Huffington Post? Have you dug Digg or read Reddit? Checked out the gadgets and cultural curiosities at BoingBoing or Engadget?
If you have done any of the above, you’ve blogged. And you are not alone. According to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, there are over 60 million blog sites now. Blogs have moved out of the strictly personal diary/confessional arena to encompassing opinions on almost every topic imaginable. And blogs are becoming much more commercial. Many now accept advertising and many companies now add blog entries to their websites. Readers like the personal nature of blogs and often enjoy adding their two cents to an issue. Because of the popularity of online blogs, we started thinking of adding a blog to our Raphel Marketing website.
Like Hamlet, we debated the pros and cons of starting a blog ourselves.
A blog would give us a chance to reach out and engage in conversation with our customers and other visitors to our site. We could express opinions on marketing and other subjects, ask for comments, let guest bloggers give their opinions on various issues. We could give links to other interesting marketing sites and other bloggers. And maybe we could become so popular with our views and marketing information, that advertisers would come purse in hand, begging us to let them ply their wares on our amazingly popular blog site.
Or maybe not. Maybe we would serve up our opinions to an unresponsive cyberspace. Maybe no one would care. Maybe people would get angry at one of our opinions and write back unflattering or nasty notes. What could we be getting ourselves into?
My particular experience with blogs gave me a little bit of a pause. I had gotten addicted to political blogs in the months before the 2004 Presidential elections, and I wasted countless hours on the reading of one silly rumor and opinion after another. On election day, I became convinced that the bloggers who predicted Kerry’s election from exit polls were right, only to be informed later in the evening that there would be four more years of Bush. After the election, I swore off political blogs, at least until the next election.
We finally decided to let some college students weigh in on the usefulness of blogs.
My wife Janis Raye and I are team teaching a course on Internet marketing this semester at a local state college in Vermont. We were recruited to teach the course at the last minute after another professor suddenly resigned, and so we were forced to scramble to stay at least one lesson ahead of our students.
One day in class we were discussing the various ways communication occurs on the Internet, we happened to start talking about blogs. We didn’t mention we were thinking about doing a blog ourselves, but we gave the students some information about how blogs work. We told them that writing about one’s thoughts and feelings has really caught on, and that blogs were becoming an important part of Internet marketing.
To our amazement, none of the students in our class read blogs on a regular basis. In fact, most had never heard of them. We assigned them some popular blogs (political, sports oriented, diet, skiing) to look at. Our students said they were not particularly impressed, saying that they would be just as happy if blogs never existed.
Part of this disapprobation may be regional. Our students are from northern Vermont, a region of politeness and reticence. Our students are not as likely as students from other regions of the country to brag about themselves or take prolonged public looks at their navel. When we told them about strides in video email, they said they’d rather receive text messages. When we asked them how much time they spent on facebook, a college network, most visited rarely if they had an account at all.
Our students certainly were not giving blogs a thumbs up. But we decided to keep investigating blogs. Like Hamlet, we didn’t want to make a final decision until all the facts were in.
How about the competition? To see what other people liked, we looked at the Marketing Sherpa’s list of its readers favorite blog sites. (Marketing Sherpa at www.marketingsherpa.com is a great source of web marketing information.). Take a look for yourself at Marketing Sherpa’s list of top-rated blogs at http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=28308. After perusing some of these blogs, I found that some piqued my interest, some were not my speed at all, and some seemed to be so full of advertising that I couldn’t separate content from salesmanship. All and all a rather mixed bag at best, and not a group that I would mind competing with in the area of marketing tidbits.
I then thought about a former employer and friend of mine, Victor Niederhoffer, who runs an extremely successful hedge fund business. Along with his colleague Laurel Kenner, and featuring collaborators among other business people and cognoscenti, Victor runs a blog/website “dedicated to ballyhoo deflation and applying the scientific method in finance.” Victor and his associates have created an interesting, pugnacious forum in which interested individuals can inform each other on a variety of issues, mainly related in some way to market speculation. Victor’s site serves a serious purpose in an entertaining way, and maybe I could do the same thing in the marketing arena. To see Victor’s site, go to www.dailyspeculations.com.
I started to think about the ideas I had put down so far in this Raphel Report. Hmmmm, my thoughts on blogging, links to other sites, soliciting other people’s opinion. Sounds suspiciously like a blog. If I enjoyed doing these Raphel Reports (and I do), maybe I would enjoy a blog.
So I did it. Or rather we did it. All of us at Raphel Marketing are starting a new blog on marketing. Hopefully you will join in the conversation. And maybe you’ll become a guest blogger, or maybe you will start a blog of your own.
Goodbye to my Hamlet-like indecision. It’s time for action.
I came. I saw. I’m blogging!
Neil:
Glad to add the blog to our “bag of tricks” here at Raphel Marketing. It’s exciting to envision conversations via blogs with people interested in marketing. I’ll blog when the spirit moves me, too!
Thanks for the invite. Not “into” blogging myself . . . at least not yet . . . but maybe this will change my mind.
I’ve been blogging for some time. Commenting on other blogs, writing my own, its a great way to exchange ideas, and discuss theory, or just plain debate. Glad to see you out in the blogosphere!