How Not To Blog, First In A Series

“Blogging” is a really buzzworthy term right now, just like “iPhone” or “Wii.” Another thing blogging has in common with those in-demand gadgets is that a lot of the masses clamoring for them don’t have a realistic set of expectations regarding what they’ll do with the advice or how they’ll do it.

There are a lot of ways that blogs provide value to e-commerce Web sites. If they’re updated regularly, they tend to be good at finding their way up the list of natural search engine rankings. They provide a simple content delivery platform for making newsworthy announcements to your customer base. They create a loyal community of readers who are more likely to buy from your site when they need your product.

That last bit? That’s important. I’ve had too many conversations with people who don’t get how or why blogging works, and in every one of them, the stumbling block is that last one. Brands want the benefit of a blog without being open to the tactics and strategies that make blogs beneficial and, sadly, that just doesn’t work.

Blogs are about personality. At best, they’re a tool for shedding the sales-y, business image a store conveys and getting personal with an audience – customers. As someone who’s been blogging for longer than I’ve been comfortable admitting, I’ve learned that getting noticed comes from building relationships and being entertaining, not simply using a blog as a platform for self-promotion.

A few months ago, we were developing a blog for a client and ran into the dreaded “How do I make this entertaining?” conundrum. It happens sometimes; I won’t lie. I’m not going to name the client or the product, but the team had a brainstorming session and came up with a brilliant idea.

We Photoshopped the client’s product into a few of the most notable LOLcats images floating around the Web. LOLcats – essentially pictures of kittens with funny, poorly spelled phrases attached to them – may seem incomprehensible or silly; they are both of those things, but they are also popular and sometimes they’re incomprehensibly funny. The most visible perpetrators of the phenomenon still have one of the most popular blogs (icanhascheezburger.com) in the world according to Technorati.

It was a hit around the office, and we posted it to the blog with our fingers crossed that it would ignite a firestorm of Internet fame for our client…only to discover that the client quietly took the post down without ever mentioning it to us.

Did they hurt their site by removing the blog post? No way. I’m confident that they felt they were protecting the brand, and in a real-world marketing sense, they might be right. But I am sure that they missed a great opportunity to promote themselves online.

No matter which of our clients we’re working with, our team is always an ambassador for their brands online. Sometimes, especially when it comes to blogging, that means stepping outside the box a bit and maybe even being a bit silly. If you look at the enterprise brands that really get Web 2.0, you’ll see a trend – a willingness to take risks and be a little more open online. When it comes to blogging, social media, and just plain online visibility, maybe attitude really is everything.