When You Shouldn't Blog

I've worked most of my career in manufacturing and distribution companies. Typically these are companies that are slow to new trends in Information Technology. For instance, I had the privilege of being able to put in the first e-mail system for a $100m distributor back in the mid 90s as well as drop in their website. I've also recently been involved in helping another company try to consolidate their brand presence on-line. In the rush to "get on the web" sometimes companies make strategic errors.

The core of these errors is forgetting the cardinal rule of the web. Content is king. It's not the volume of content that one pushes out or we'd all be so much happier with the volume of spam we receive. It's the content that fulfills three requirements: content that is accurate, relevant, and timely (ART) to the end user.

Think of it, you have spam filters in your email clients to try to use a Bayesian filter to make sure you never have to read email that isn't accurate, relevant, and timely to you. With the migration of web content into digg, delicious, and RSS feeds, you are starting to see some of those same ideas about how to filter content done by humans. It won't be long before you see your web browsers using search engines and your surfing history to suggest stories and sites you might find interesting. Similar to Amazon's recommendation engine, but with your web surfing as input.

So if you're blogging all the time for your company, but you struggle for content to write about that you feel your customers want to read, then you have a problem. You're drowning your signal in noise. Instead, it's important that your customer can expect a certain level of quality and topic consistency. Is your blog about you, or is it about your product, or a topic of interest.

Related, maybe you don't want to be blogging at all. I've found this column by Jakob Nielsen so insightful, that on the strength of it I went to one of his usability conferences. Jakob's point is that given the ease of blogging, and the standard distribution of quality that blog posts will have, it's sometimes better to write an article and let the blogs point to you. (And as I've blogged about his article, you can see it can work.)

Basically, if you are the acknowledged expert on a particular subject, blogging actually detracts from your status as the expert. On any given subject, many people will blog. Some number of them will communicate it better than you, even if they aren't as educated on the topic. And by coming into the blogsphere to write about your expertise, you actually remove part of your expertise.

So my recommendation to you? Blog. But blog with a purpose, not a deadline. If you're writing on your expertise, make the blog post meaty enough to be an article. Give your viewers something solid enough that they always see your posts as high value and worth reading.