Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Business bloggers have lost interest in blogging
Business bloggers are no longer interested in finding out about blogging. Or at least so it seems. The lack of interest means that the latest Blog Business Summit has been cancelled. This follows three years where the Blog Business Summit was THE place to go to find out about the latest developments in business blogging.
According to the organisers, the reason is that business blogging has been subsumed into general social networking sites, like Facebook and MySpace, where you can do a host of other activities and write blogs. Indeed, so confident are the founders of the Blog Business Summit that this is the way to go, that they have set up Web Community Forum, a discussion and meeting site where the latest on the use of social media is written about.
However, the lack of interest in blogging for business is not because the technology has matured. Nor is it because businesses realise that social networking and blogging are now intertwined. Neither is this lack of interest in business blogging due to the fact that companies perceive it to be part of the marketing mix.
Instead, it's because the vast majority of businesses still don't understand what blogging is. Most people's impression of blogging is a diary or online journal with some trivia in it. True there are lots of blogs like that. But blogging is simply a name given to a content management system. For example, this web site is made up of three separate blogs - spot the joins! Here is another web site that is technically a blog - click this link for a surprise.
Because most businesses have not yet worked out that blogging is about content management, they have given up the notion of adding a blog to their business because they can't see the point of blogs generally. Neither can I when they only tell me that someone has fed their cat, or just been down to the shops. But a content management system - that's a business essential.
So why has everyone deserted the Blog Business Summit? Well, social media, Facebook and so on, all seem so much more interesting. They appear to provide what blogging seemed to promise - more interaction with people. And true, they can help a business. But everyone online needs to manage their content and blogging tools provide the easiest and cheapest way of doing that, especially for small businesses. Rather than walking away from blogging, businesses need to embrace it. Giving up blogging is precisely the wrong thing to do.
Labels: blogging
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Readers' Comments:
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August 28, 2007 7:07 PM 
said…
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August 28, 2007 9:24 PM 
Graham Jones said…
Thanks for clarifying this. I should have pointed out the impact of earlier events on your planned summit. Perhaps there will be an opportunity for one in the future then. How about London?
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August 29, 2007 3:42 PM Gerald said…
Hi, Graham
A blog isn't a content management system. A CMS is so much more, and can create the sort of dynamic and static pages that a modern business needs. Wordpress has tried to bridge the gap - not only do they allow journal-style posting, but they also include static pages for non-dynamic data.
According to a number of sources, one of the criteria for a website to be a blog is to have reverse-chronological posting. All blogs feature this (unless you mess with the postdate information).
For businesses to really begin to incorprate blogs into their web presence, they need to be shown how to blog - not the nuts and bolts of posting, but what information goes into the blog, how often it's updated, how it's marketed, etc etc. Your blog here is an excellent example of that!
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August 29, 2007 4:48 PM Graham Jones said…
Gerald, thanks for the positive comment about my blog..! I still think that blogging software can be a rudimentary content management system, though I admit at the moment it is not fully fledged in the way that professional CMS software is. For small sites, blogging can be a cost effective way of managing content though. I have static web pages created as blogs for instance, but I know if I need to I can update them from anywhere at any time, which is why I use blogs.
Graham: As I posted, the main reason we didn't move forward with the event was that two really good blogger events were recently held in Chicago, which sucked much of the proverbial "air out of the room." It was not that there is lack of interest in blogging. That being said, I agree that far too many businesses still don't "get" blogging, and that blogs aren't as sexy a topic today as Facebook is...
The big revelation for me back in 2003 was what you say here. Blogging engines are the content management platforms of the future.