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18 Irreverent Thoughts About the Pork Belly of Digital Content

I remember when I was a young boy in the ’60s and the hippies who lived in that restored school bus out in the meadow started tripping and when they came back to earth, they started this thing called blogging. It was really something. They raised a tie-dyed flag above the bus that read “Blogging is our Bag.” I guess it was Ken Kesey who invented the blog, or maybe Stewart Brand or Sly Stone. Those were the days….

  1. Doesn’t it seem like the blog has been around a very long time?
  2. A blog is a pork belly
  3. Or, as Nicholas Carr famously said of IT, “a commodity input that is necessary for competitiveness, but insufficient for advantage” (Does IT Matter, Harvard Business School Press, 2004)
  4. “Now that everybody blogs, no one blogs” — Yogi Berra
  5. Blogging is like the 405 freeway in L.A. jammed with drivers who technically have a license to drive. If there’s an F1 driver among them, you’ll never know it.
  6. I didn’t come up with this indictment of the blog. My technologist friend Keno Vigil said it to me recently during a discussion about which marketing services are truly valuable to a brand.
  7. I didn’t come up with the analysis, but I aim to fix it on behalf of Muddy Gecko. I want us to have a program that takes a client beyond merely ordering blogs from our business development representativesthe same way they order up some cheeseburgers.
  8. What is the difference between a blog and a commercial? At least the commercial is visually interesting and entertaining and has top-drawer writers working on it.
  9. Maybe the idea is to produce a blog that costs $20k to publish, all-in. Imagine the production values and thought leadership on a sleek S-Class blog. Now that would be something.
  10. I like quasi-short blogs in the 100–300 word range. It’s like the round in a boxing match. Get in there, throw four of five solid jabs and get out of there. Let your corner man take care of you; get ready for the next round.
  11. I’m going to lay some of the blame at the feet of SEO. I hear experts who advise writing a 1,000-word blog. It’s more searchable that way. Okay, so take a weak idea and pad it out with dull prose so it triples in size? I think a 1,000-word blog, gamed with keywords and marinated in mediocrity is an insult to anyone reading blogs on smartphones in 405 freeway traffic.
  12. The blog problem is the business problem. Blogs should not be written as a way for you to be found. Find another way to be found. A blog should be a retention tool and not a sales funnel sweetener. Use your blog, strategically, as a way to let your customers know that you are out there thinking way ahead of them about the things that keep them awake at night.
  13. Too many blogs are written between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m.
  14. And stop calling your blog an asset. That’s half your problem.
  15. Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team, of bloggers.
    – Steve Jobs
  16. “Weblogs” became “blogs” about twenty years ago, on the eve of Y2K and Matchbox Twenty. Let’s come up with a new name for blogs, and one that doesn’t use the word “snap,” “fire” or “epic” in it.
  17. There are probably 300 million bloggers blogging. Let’s cull the herd. Let’s usher in a peer review process on blogs like scientists do with research papers. Let’s have blog qualifying like NASCAR does on Friday afternoons. Don’t write a blog that your kindergartner doesn’t squeal with delight upon hearing.
  18. We live in a modern (maybe) era of ubiquitous smartphones and a pandemic of dark-cloud AI stories, delivered by AI into our newsfeed. Robots are about to take your job! Why are you still sitting there blogging?

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