Robert W. Bly - Blog Schmog: The Truth about What Blogs Can (and Cant) Do for Your Business

Copyright 2006 by Robert W. Bly

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by Thomas Nelson, Inc., P. O. Box 141000, Nashville, Tennessee 37214.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available

Bly, Robert W.
Blog, schmog! : the truth about what blogs can (and can't) do for your business / by Robert W. Bly.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7852-1576-9 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 0-7852-1576-X
1. Internet marketing. 2. Business enterprises--Blogs. 3. Blogs. I.Title.
HF5415.1265.B578 2006
659.2--dc22

2006032316

Printed in the United States of America

06 07 08 09 QW 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is for my nephew,
Daniel Sprecher

Are you spending too much time blogging... and not
enough time getting productive work done?

DILBERT: Scott Adams/Dist. by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.

It is of the nature of ideas to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed

The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Not everything that you think should be said. And not everything that you say should be written. And not everything that is written should be printed.

Menachem Mendel (17871859)

I cant stand another minute of this mindless gab!

Dexters Laboratory, Cartoon Network

>> WARNING <<

This is a highly idiosyncratic, personal, and opinionated book, written by a marketing advisor with a quarter century of experience, about blogging and in particular about the value (or lack thereof) of blogging as a marketing tool.

If you are a blogging evangelist or consultant, Iguarantee you will hate this book and that it willmake you angry.

If you are a practical marketer concerned with results, this book can prevent you from wasting a lot of time and money, improve your marketing results, and create realistic expectations about what blogging canand cannotdo for your business.

As a side benefit, it may also save you a small fortune on consultant fees, not to mention a lot of wasted time, energy, and effort that would get you a better return on investment spent in other areas of your marketing.

CONTENTS

APPENDICES

Blogging, which in its most basic form is journaling onlinebut which also has ramifications much more far-reachinggained national prominence in 2004.

BusinessWeek said that blogging was undergoing explosive growth.

Eight million American adults say they have started blogs. One out of four Internet users reads blogs, and 12 percent of Internet users have posted comments on blogs.

A number of bloggers are self-described blogging evangelists. They believe blogging is an Internet revolution that will make conventional communication obsolete. Some derisively refer to books, magazines, and newspapers as antiquated dead-tree media, and they are convinced that blogging will become the most powerful form of marketing and media on the planet.

They may be right: according to an article published by the Illinois Information Technology Association (IITA), 550 million Internet searches are done daily worldwide... and only 23 percent of adults under age thirty read newspapers regularly anymore.

Many bloggers express outright contempt for the mainstream media (New York City book publishers, national magazines, daily newspapers). They say the only way to get published in these dead-tree media is through either (a) luck or (b) inside connections.

Conventional publishing is certainly not in its prime: according to The Week, more than one out of three hardcover books are returned by bookstores to the publishers unsold each year. An article in BtoB reports that after 2006, Thomas Publishing will cease publishing the print edition of its industrial buying directory, Thomas Register, making it available online only.

Quicker than we probably think, print will be replaced by the online delivery system as the primary source of content, says consultant Malcolm Netburn in an interview with Circulation Management. I look at my 15-year-old son and his friends, and I see where they get their information. And its overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, over the Internet.

If you are an author, a bibliophile, and a lover of the printed wordlike methis cant be happy news to you.

Whats going on, I believe, is a shortened national attention span, says Joseph Epstein. People have lost patience, endurance, tolerance for the lengthy, possibly even the leisurely, presentation of culture, teaching, entertainment, and much else... everyone wants shorter takes.In a world of short-take readers, blogs certainly fit the bill.

Rick Bruner, an active blogger and my polar opposite in all things marketing, questions the effectiveness of my use of traditional mediaspecifically, articles I write for DM News, the weekly newspaper of the direct marketing industry.

He, too, refers to trade journals and newsletters as dead-tree media, and suggests that online communication, like blogging, is really where the most effective marketing is. Im not so sure. So far my blogging has brought me a lot of fascinating discussions with bloggers, but hardly any posts from potential clients.

My DM News articles, on the other hand, bring me a steady stream of leads, all from the direct marketers who are my potential clientsbecause thats who reads DM News.

My dead-tree medium is highly targeted. I am not sure who reads blogs, but DM News has an audit-verified circulation of fifty thousand direct marketers, which is my target spot-on market.

Heres my quick take on online versus offline media: online is more high tech, more todays hot topic, more the flavor of the month, more appealing to the under-thirty crowd, and more interactive.

Online is easier to respond to, and the response and discussion is immediately visible to everyone on the Internet. The conversation can spread like wildfire, which is a real plus.

Offline is more traditional, more appealing to the over-fifty crowd, and has greater selectivity. Anyone can publish a blog, Web site, or e-zine (electronic magazine). Thats why David St. Lawrence calls blogging Citizens Publishing.But not everyone can get published in Harvard Business Review or the Wall Street Journalor convince McGraw-Hill or John Wiley & Sons to publish their book.

And thats why these dead-tree media, unlike a blog, give the author a certain status and credibility that self-published online writings, like e-books, do not.

The best tactic is a mixed-media approach. For instance, I am a regular contributor to dead-tree media including WritersDigest and DM News. And I am the author of more than sixty books published by such mainstream publishing houses as Prentice Hall and Amacom.