Did you know that less than 20% of blogs worldwide are updated on a weekly basis and that on a daily basis less than 10% have fresh content?
So what happened? A bunch of people (and many companies) got really excited about this new free, online tactic that could help them communicate their thoughts, ideas and dare I say it their products for sale to their market. They launched their blog with great enthusiasm and content. Their customers and perhaps some prospects "signed up" either through an RSS feed, bookmarking or "browser habits" and then something happen.
That something was a lack of content and what I like to call "steam". Sure the blog thing was great but there were big deals to close, events to attend, vacations, new solutions and so on and so on. And so the blog suffered. At first the daily posts declined to a few times weekly, then weekly posts started and then one day someone realized "wait a second we haven't posted on our blog in a really long time...that can't be good"! When the company (or person) starting asking why did we stop posting what they heard sounded a lot like we either need to hire someone to do this or not do it.
All of the sudden that "free tactic" blogging didn't feel so free anymore...welcome to Web 2.0 over enthusiasm. The majority of these firms didn't plan for this to happen, and that is why it happened. They jumped into blogging without thinking about what it would take to be successful. They wouldn't do that with a product development project (or at least I hope they wouldn't), they would not do that for a new hire and they certainly wouldn't do that for a new market...but a blog...they jumped in!
So, what is our industry and the bloggers amongst us to do now? It's not too late to plan. And if you have not started a blog yet, write a plan first...think about the ROI from the blog as well as the resources needed to get that ROI...if it's not justified don't do it. Let us know how it goes!
Sean Reardon
Web 2.0 Team The JS Group
http://www.thejsgroup.net/blog