At a recent prospect meeting, the marketing manager - who was a bit of an internet naysayer - suggested to me that there was absolutely no point in blogging because none of their customers would read a blog, His justification was that because he had never read a blog, then he doubted anyone else would. Without entering into a discussion about his obvious logical fallacy, I have to say I seriously doubted the truth of his argument. Not because I thought he was deliberately lying - I am sure he truly believed what he said. But because I doubted whether he would have actually realised he was reading a blog when he did a search.
David Meerman Scott discussed this in a post recently which reminded me of my conversation. His comment
"Many people who read blogs via search don't even know they are on a blog"
is so true. Just because there is a body of us in the communication and online reputation space who talk, think, read and breathe blogs almost every day, doesn't mean everyone knows a blog from a website.
Let me use an example. Let's say my prospect was addicted to Sudoku puzzles (he might have been - I can't say I actually asked). If he had done a search for 'addicted to Sudoku' at least three of the first 10 results in Google are blog posts. Let's try something a little less obscure - perhaps within his line of work he was required to do some research on the customer experience of radio advertising. This search produces five of the ten results which are blogs. Granted, some of them say the word 'blog' quite clearly in the titles or URLs, but others don't. In reality, these latter results, to your average layperson, are simply results.
It's blog delivery by stealth almost. And it possibly suggests that more people are reading blogs than the statistics say.
I won't go into the SEO benefits of blogs - there are plenty of people out there already saying it. And although I am deeply troubled by some SEO people who think that blogs are useful ONLY for search results, when it comes to disseminating blogs out to people who really only use search, the fact they are dynamic gives a company an edge. Sure, these readers may not have got to the stage of subscribing yet. They may not quite understand how to or whether to comment. But to say they aren't reading blogs isn't quite accurate. But I am sure my prospect will come up with some other argument. Some people just need a little more time.