Justin Creally is a partner at “High Road Communications”:http://www.highroad.com/, Canada’s largest PR agency serving technology and digital lifestyle companies. Justin works with clients such as Microsoft, Buena Vista Games and ATI Technologies to help guide their online communications strategies.
*One Degree: What’s Vox?*
As a PR agency, clients turn to us because they want strong communications programs. Our social media and digital marketing services enable our clients to reach customers and other key stakeholders by using next-generation PR. Obviously, traditional media relations continues to be a core component of what we do. But for several clients, especially those reaching out to college-aged consumers or other niche markets, traditional mainstream media is limited in its effectiveness. We’ve turned up the volume on our social media and digital marketing services in the past year, as more clients turn to us for help in reaching audiences online.
*One Degree: Does this mark a new approach to interactive for the agency?*
Category: Blogs
I get that you want to promote the fact you have a blog. And I see you have a lot of great stuff in there. But for the love of decent results why would you use your blog as a landing page?
Yet this seems to be a trend. I just received one of my regular emails on marketing topics, this one a newsletter on marketing to IT. Front and center they’re offering a new report on media consumption, sounds great!
Uh-oh, I see the dreaded words “download from our blog site” and I can sense what’s coming. Sure enough, I click to the site and there’s already a bunch of new posts on top of the report they told me about. At least I think it’s the one. There are a bunch of articles on different media topics, but only one has a chart. None of the entries are labelled, “IT media consumption study.”
I was talking to a colleague at “Tucows”:http://www.tucows.com/ and we hit on something I’d experienced before, but hadn’t quite formalized into a structured idea.
The issue at hand was “what is the proper way to ‘test’ a new blogging platform – or blogging in general for that matter?”
To me the biggest benefit of having a blog is not “publishing a personal diary” but “sharing thoughts with the world”. The impact of blogging on your ability to share with others only happens if others can in fact share – otherwise you are just talking to yourself.
And therein lies the problem.
If you are “just testing” blogging, or a new platform like “vox”:http://kenschafer.vox.com/, you don’t really want to tell people it’s only a test and that you might not keep it going.
In a nutshell, *without committing to blogging it is very hard to get the benefits of blogging.* My guess is the blogosphere is strewn with “hello world”:http://technorati.com/search/%22hello%20world%22?language=en&authority=n blog posts that are the first and last post because it is impossible to see the benefit of post number two.