Reasons to blog

A good friend of mine sent met last week the link to an interesting Indian blog by Bhupendra Khanal. He put my blog as one of the top 5 blogs to follow.  His assessment of my blog writing as “lazy” and “not well marketed” was very interesting. Bhupendra absolutely right; he motivated me to think again about my reasons for blogging and my audience. Here are a few thoughts:

• I am somewhat of an unusual blogger due to my less frequent postings. My writing is more self than audience focused. Marketinggeek is for me a constant motivation to push my thinking, reworking it, and then putting it into words. It’s less about engaging with a large audience than about working on some marketing issues by myself and than publishing it. This is the reason why I don’t spend too much time on marketing the blog. Therefore I don’t care too much about my Blog ranking.
  
• It seems that a large amount of reader blog comments (especially in the US) are nasty and mean spirited. I will never understand why readers post comments about the stupidity of the blog that they are reading: No one forces them to read it. I don’t want to waste my team in getting drawn into this vicious cycle of responding to negative comments. It might drive traffic and stronger blog community but I consider it unproductive and irrelevant.
  
• I estimate that half of my audiences are colleagues from my company. Thjs blog helps to start conversations with my colleagues whenever I meet them. It’s unbelievable powerful tool in a company with almost 10,000 employees. It creates a sense of loose community and transparent sharing of thinking that could not be created otherwise.
  
• Today’s New York Times has a good article by Sharon Otterman about a movement called “Slow Blog”. She quotes Todd Sieling, a technology consultant from Vancouover who published a “Slow Blog Manifesto” in 2006: “Slow Blogging is a rejection of immediacy. It is an affirmation that not all things worth reading are written quickly”. It seems that the fast pace of Blogging that we have seen two or three years ago moves stronger into the Twitter world. I will definitely stay stronger in the blogger world of 2005 and 2006. 

There are a lot of different reasons to blog. It might be time to outline a smart taxonomy of blogs, not by interests or disciplines but by inherent blog characteristics and blogger intentions.