January 9, 2006
one more time: “blogs are a great way to make things happen indirectly”
From my best estimates, I’d say at least 90% of English Cut’s paying customers have never heard of or read gapingvoid.
What does that tell me? That blogging doesn’t work in the cause-and-effect way a lot of people think it does.
Indirectly. Blogs are a great way to make things happen indirectly.
But so many people live or die by metrics and “deliverables”, they can’t get their head around that.
A simple example (which you may have illustrated in a past post) is how blogs effect search engines. The act of Google bombing is a great way of demonstrating the power of even just a few regularly updated websites to sway the ratings of our little info-sorting web-god.
Blogging increases your google rating which increases your profile to potential customers.
So, if there’s that one indirect pathway, what are some of the others. We could make a list!
1. Word of mouth — your blog-readers may act as a touch-off for the spread of your word to the rest of the world.
2. Feedback — the feedback you get from your readership helps you fine tune your other marketting. (marketting disruption 101)
3. What else? — I bet there’s more.
I’ll think about it.
I’ve always been a fan of indirect action. Why spend a God-awful amount of time driving traffic to a website, only to deal with the fickleness of web browsers, when all you have to do is make sure you’re interesting enough so people will want to talk about you.
Why go to a gym and slave away for hours to lose weight, when you could take up martial arts and have oodles of fun doing it?
It’s certainly the case that ‘life’ doesn’t work through metrics and deliverables.
But it does, nonetheless work.
And figuring out ‘how’ is surely part of the fun.
If you choose to opt out of the world metrics and deliverables, you still need to be able to persuasively explain how ‘indirectly’ works.
“Today, I shall mostly be evaluating my commercial contribution through the medium of poetry.…”
Heh. Even if you explain it persuasively doesn’t mean they will get it.
Live by metrics, die by metrics.
There’s also the perception that blogs are only read by certain market segments, and that if you’re not selling to blog geeks, thsn blogging for business has no value.
I blogged recently about not assuming that just because your customers are in a “traditional” industry that they aren’t interesting in reading a blog containing information of value to them. (http://blog.kemsleydesign.com/2006/01/business-blogging-in-2006.html)
Fair point Hugh!
Equally live by the cartoon…
And live by poetry…
Which prompts a little cummings moment:
“While you and i have lips and voices which
are for kissing and to sing with
who cares if some oneyed son of a bitch
invents an instrument to measure Spring with?”
I think blogs work extremely directly…they are just denominated in a different currency to that of software sales. Or even wine sales.
Give people the gift of self-expression…and strange, chaotic, humane things can happen…
“Live by poetry. Die even more quickly.” Exactly.
What gets measured gets done: True.
What can’t be measured doesn’t exist: False.
But be careful not to confuse the two.
Alex, you should read:
‘I want you to chaeat’, by John Seddon on piratical idiocies of payment by results and otehr forms of bad measurement.
Virtually every public service is testimony to the dangers of bad measurement:
League tables?
NHS waiting lists?
CSA response times?
What gets measured gets contorted…as sure as eggs are chickens.
Blogger Messiah thruth #739: I swear to god, good taste CAN be learned.
Blogging is important because it is generally conversations between influencers, rather than something that reaches mass-market.
What sort of stuff leads customers to English Cut? (referrals from customers? referrals from non-customers?)