Productive Blog Posts

This is going to be a bit of me writing my thoughts on the fly, but I was thinking about the world of online marketing blogs and what kind of blogs and postings are beneficial to the universe of its readers. By 'beneficial', I mean that it benefits or adds positively to the online marketing blogsphere rather than just increasing the clutter that people have to weed through to find what they're looking for.

Most of the online marketing news and blog resources that I read every day are listed in the link list on the sidebar of this blog. These are all fairly highly trafficked sites with ample visibility and which I visit on a daily basis. However, this list is far from all of the news and blog sites out there that target online marketing professionals. So the question arises - what am I missing by following only this subset of resources?

As far as news goes, I think that I have my bases covered. Between ClickZ, MarketingVox (more of a news aggregator than a reporter), AdAge, iMedia Connection, Media Buyer Planner, DMNews and MediaPost, I would like to think that virtually no news will slip through. What the rest of the blog sites provide is commentary and thought, which is often more valuable than news alone. They also post links to things like interesting new sites or tools as well as coverage of industry conferences. If I break down the possible types of posts that an online marketing blog could have, I think it would look something like the following:

1. Commentary and thoughts, including reviews of marketing tactics and tools
2. Reporting - coverage of conferences, links to new or interesting advertising campaigns
3. Links to news and articles with the associated comments, "this is interesting" or something to that effect

I think that the value of these types of posts certainly depends on their audience - a list of links would be more valuable to someone who doesn't sift through a lot of sites on their own than someone who reads 50 sites a day - but simply posting links does not add anything of substance to the universe of online marketing resources unless you have created a truly unique link list that many people can find value in.

There is no doubt that reporting (#2 above) is of significant value. These types of posts add raw information to the web and are easy to scan, thus limiting time expended deciphering whether or not you want to read the entire post.

Posts providing commentary (#1 above) is a tougher discussion. We all have our opinions of what type of commentary is worth reading and what isn't. If it's the right type of commentary, I think that one can learn much more from one good commentary post than any other form of post. Breaking down the different types of commentary posts, we get:

1. Views on a particular piece of news or state of affairs
2. Sharing of personal experiences

Sharing of personal experiences can be broken down further into writings about incidental experiences (i.e. such and such worked well for this branding campaign) and writings about a personal ongoing project that you're working on, and I think that these types of posts are productive because of their purported uniqueness. You're learning from someone else's experiences.

Views (#1 above) can be tremendously productive in my opinion. You can learn about such things as the direction the industry is heading in or the implications of a particular technology. However, they can also be tremendously wasteful. First of all, you have to have readers that want to hear your thoughts, and secondly, you need good things to say with strong arguments; otherwise, time-strapped professionals don't want to expend that time. When marketers like myself post commentary, we want our thoughts to impact people. If it doesn't, then we're failing at what we're doing. Additionally, these types of posts should be unique. If someone else has already written the exact view that you are about to, then that just adds to the clutter (I suppose that refreshing a view that appeared in the past and has been all but forgotten would serve to bring the idea back to the front page I suppose).

In concluding thoughts, I think that reporting of news and events and sharing of personal experiences are always productive blog posts. Bloggers shouldn't hold back from posting these. However, commentary should be done sparingly in order to avoid dilution unless you are a significant influencer (i.e. Seth Godin or Charlene Li), and when done, these posts should be unique, and need to be written carefully and with attention to detail so as to maximize your credibility. I hope that this bit of rambling will be useful to even just one person out there, and I myself will try to be mindful of these discussion points for the future of this blog.

Update (3/16/06) - Some thoughts on the topic by Seth Godin here.