What makes a blog a successful conversation
Flying to the East Coast and back in three days really messes with one’s internal time mechanisms! So I am awake at 4 in the morning and blogging.
About 60 PR people came to listen to us talk about blogs, feeds, wikis and podcasts. One of the abiding themes was that a blog has to authentic and real. It has to speak to the needs of the audience.
The audience was warned against hiring outside bloggers and/or creating fake blogs.
For me the most important criteria is whether or not the blog communicates a message that has value for your audience.
The successful Stonyfield Farms’ blogs are not written by an employee who started to blog. They hired someone specifically to run their blogs.
Earthlink is hiring a chief blogger right now.
I believe that as long as the person who is blogging takes the time to become familiar with company and the audience, and is capable of starting and maintaining a conversation that holds the attention and participation of that audience, it will work.
It comes back to the sage words of Bill French at Myst Technology
It’s not about creating a blog or a feed – it’s about creating one they can’t live without.
We spoke briefly about character blogs and I brought to their attention the case of a company that sells lingerie specializing in plus-size women.
It is owned by a woman who has a character called Fifi on her website. She has been writing a column called The Wisdom of Fifi for years and they write to back to her by email. She has a vibrant conversation going with her audience. Now she is considering blogging.
Steve Rubel suggested that in order to remain genuine and authentic she should blog as herself, not the character Fifi. She could blog about what she is doing with her character on the website.
While this may be of interest to other bloggers and marketers it would be of zero interest to her audience. They have an established relationship with Fifi.
So I don’t think we can make arbitrary rules like a successful blog can only be done by an employee or a blog can’t be written by a character.
What makes a blog really successful, genuine and authentic depends on whether you can create a real conversation that has value for your readers.
