Earth to bloggers, Earth calling bloggers
One thing that does piss me off a bit abot the whole blogosphere thing, is how many bloggers seem to think EVERYONE knows about blogs and reads them. When in reality it’s got a LONG way to go before blogging becomes as well known as email or the Internet as a whole.
Bloggers pipe up and moan about how dare a company not have a blog to be able to commuicate with their customers and potential customers. They talk about how companies could deal with problems much more easily by having a blog that customers can read and get information from. Fine, that works if 100% of your market reads blogs. What if only 10% of your market reads blogs? In the company I work for, the web site accounts for less than 10% of overall business, averaging somewhere around 7/8%. Around half our business comes from one annual catalogue. I’ve suggested we start a blog, as a good way to get more people visiting the site and creating some more communication with those visitors. But what about the 90% or so of customers who don’t buy via the web site? Some of them may actually visit the web site at times, but I would bet most of them don’t.
I’ve just read a post by Keith Robinson at his blog Asterisk about problems with RSS/Atom and explaining the concept to people.
I’ve been talking to people. You know, in person? And it turns out that blogging isn’t as big as we might think it is. I’ve spoken with many people who I’d assumed were at least somewhat familiar with the term “blog” only to find out they might know more about podcasting than they do blogging.
For example, I had a chat two weeks or so ago with two very highly educated professionals. One, a marketing coordinator, had never heard of blogging. (She was in marketing! Hellooo?!?) The other, a teacher, knew the term, but didn’t know much more than that.
Now, to me, the fact Keith is amazed that a marketing person doesn’t know about blogs (our marketing guy here doesn’t know about them either by the way, his method of generating 2 way communiction is to send out direct mail marketing and set up a “club”) is as bad as Keith thinking blogging was bigger than it is. In the general scheme of things, blogging is still pretty small, to me, that smacks of dillusions of grandeur. As bad an offence as ignorance.