Blogs Let Amateurs Steal Your Business Expertise
Newsweek ran a story recently about the backlash to user generated content and citizen journalism. The problem is that people are busy. They don’t have the time to vet sources, they want the information they need now and they need it to be right.
One of my favorite quotes from the Newsweek story was:
“People are beginning to recognize that the world is too dangerous a place for faulty information,” says Charlotte Beal, a consumer strategist for the Minneapolis-based research firm Iconoculture.”
The problem in search isn’t the search engines; it’s who’s participating in the dialog. Guess what? It’s not you.
When I’m looking for credible information about anything, the odds are that there probably are lots of businesses set up to provide the very thing I’m looking for. The issue is that the businesses do a lousy job of talking about what exactly they are expert in.
Businesses focus on ads and Web sites and direct mail and broadcast… but for the most part, your audience isn’t looking or paying attention. According to Pew Research, when 91% of us go online, we search. Because businesses aren’t blogging or otherwise creating lots of relevant content, that vacuum is being filled by the amateurs, the citizen journalists who may or may not have their facts straight.
A lot of marketers think they have this covered by applying search engine optimization tactics to their sites or investing in pay-per-click strategies. But here is the issue: Even great SEO tactics might optimize your site for a few (anywhere from one to a dozen) keyword phrases. An aggressive pay per click program might target thousands of phrases. That leaves a big gap between SEO and PPC as far as organic search goes.
When someone makes a search, they are nearly 100 times more likely to click on the top organic results than they are on the paid advertisements. The people who win those coveted spots? It is the people who are creating the most relevant content….bloggers.
This is why organizations of all sizes have to embrace blogging as a legitimate and important marketing strategy. By institutionalizing blogging among all of your employees you have a means to produce reams of expert content. Someone is going to answer my search query, shouldn’t it be you? Aren’t you the expert?
Chris Baggott is an award-winning blogger and the co-founder of Indianapolis-based Compendium Blogware. He can be reached at [email protected].
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