Skip to content

Blog is not place to aggregate target audience

February 12, 2007

Law firms and other companies regularly tell me the goal of their upcoming blog is to create a place on the Internet for all people with a similar interest to congregate and discuss the issue.

One it’s not necessary to achieve blog success, two, the company is never going to do it unless they have full-time staff and a large marketing budget to make it happen, and three it’s a big mistake.

Joe at Techdirt, commenting on the Economist’s venture into social media, is in agreement.

One of the mistakes many companies make when trying to embrace social networking or social media is to think that they should just build their own version of MySpace, or clone of some other popular site. For various reasons, these attempts almost always end up as failures.

The goal of your blog should be to enter into an ongoing Internet discussion in which your prospective clients, or those who influence them, are already partaking in or listening to.

Use on an offline analogy. You have an ongoing networking function in town that your prospective clients attend on a regular basis. Few, if any, of your competitors are attending. Would you try to create a competing function and twist your prospective clients arms to attend? No. You’d start attending the existing function and network with the participants.

Look at blogs and social media the same way. A blog is your voice. Use it when attending online functions that already exist.

The gold in social media marketing via blogs is entering into an ongoing discussion, one that thousands of people are already participating in. Don’t ignore that discussion and waste a lot of time and money in trying to create your own discussion room on your blog. Go out where the action is.

Posted in: