Thirty Million Blogs and One Lifetime

We had a great discussion at the round table discussions on Social Mediathat I chaired at the IABC European Leadership Institute last week. For the next couple of weeks, I’ll be blogging about some of the issues we talked about and asking for your thoughts on it - whether you came along to the round table discussion or not, I think these issues are relevant for communicators and businesses generally. I hope you’ll add a comment or email me to share your views and experiences.

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Thirty Million Blogs and One Lifetime

How to avoid information overload

One question we grappled with at the Social Media round table discussions was: there are so many blogs out there and busy business people and professionals have only a finite time to spend surfing the web, how can we keep track of them all?

Well, we can’t. It’s impossible to even expect that we can keep up with the estimated thirty million blogs that populate the blogosphere.

But we can keep up with some of the blogs that interest or intrigue or inform or amuse or entertain us. A business leader I know enjoys political blogs so he follows UK Member of Parliament Boris Johnson’s blog and the satirical by “Guy Fawkes’”. I follow the blogs of Malaysian writers (eg Lydia Teh and Sharon Bakar) as well as marketing blogs and new media blogs and a range of others. I don’t read them all every day but have them in my Google Reader blog aggregator and dip into different ones as the fancy takes me.

Some of the benefits of following blogs for me are:

• learning tips and information straight from an expert’s mouth eg how else could I pick up useful gems from Seth Godin, the marketing guru, from the comfort of my own home?For businesses and professionals, it goes without saying that diverse ways to increase your learning, knowledge and skills has long-term business benefits.

• picking up news some time before it is picked up by the traditional press eg I learnt about Twitter long before it hit the news; I was following the Kathy Sierra death threats story at least a week before it came on the news. Having early knowledge of what’s going to hot can help add to one’s competitive edge.

• being entertained and challenged and having my horizons broadened by videos, stories, writings etc that would never make it into the traditional media eg great YouTube videos; Asian community blogs ; “flash fiction” writing. New, fresh ideas beyond what everyone else is receiving can spark creativity and contribute to new ideas within one’s own business.

So, find the blogs that are helpful to you or that you enjoy and follow those.

How to get noticed in the crowd

For those businesses and professionals who have blogs, the question then is how can you get your blog noticed in the melee of so many competing voices?

It is unlikely that you will have the whole world coming to your blog. You don’t necessarily want or need the whole world to come to your blog. Once your accept that, I think the key to drawing an audience and getting noticed in the clamour of thirty million blogs is simple:

* Know your audience.

Who are the people you want to connect with? If your target audience is a global audience of teenagers, you’re going to create different content and have a different marketing strategy from a situation where your target audience is insurance brokers or accountants or lawyers. Think about who you want coming to your site eg Your clients. Your stakeholders. Focus on their needs and interests. If what you offer is relevant to them, they will come back for more.

* Create great content.

Write well. Make a visit to your blog an enjoyable or informative experience. Offer an incentive to come back eg prize draws (”become a subscriber and get the chance to win XXX”), a cliffhanger (”to be continued next week….”), trailers (”next week, I’ll be interviewing Brad Pitt….”). Break up serious content with personal interest or lifestyle stories.

* Pimp your site

Make your blog site visually distinct and a delight to behold. I don’t mean add so many bells and whistles and colours so that it takes ages to load or is really difficult to read because there are so many distractions on it. I mean show that your care about your readers’ visiting experience by making it user-friendly to navigate and a memorable visual experience - just as you would take care to present your brand or logo beautifully or maintain a striking and comfortable office for your clients to visit. I explore all this in more detail in my post “Are You Worth It?”

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Photo: thanks to pacifica-group.com

Note: ZenGuide is updated on Mondays and Thursdays.

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