This article is a a tad unconventional in it’s purpose. Obstensively it is an exploration of the benefits and future of blogging /publishing articles for a knowledge businesses.
It has also been written as an iteratively assembled and unashamed thinking piece to determine whether the Change Tank will establish a public blog presence – or disable this blogging feature on the new website & keep all articles purely within the private domain.
Perhaps this blog will become a useful resource for others – or perhaps it will be deleted at it’s completion & the blog functionality turned off. ??
It is difficult to know a true answer but various internet locations suggest there were as many as 200 million blogs active (or largely inactive) in 2015. Exactly how many of these business as opposed to hobby blogs is hard to discern
At the same time there were:
- 50 million business Facebook pages
- an unquantifiable number of business instagram users
- an unquantifiable number of business YouTube accounts
- many more social media publishing outlets
- large cross overs between these groups
All of this leads to the first cardinal rule.
- There’s a lot of content. How are you going to drive people to your content
At the time of writing Murdoch has laid off another quarter of its staff – dropping the head office from 6 floors to only a single floor – leading to an unprecedented one week journalists strike. The issue… Or the stated issue. JOURNALISTIC QUALITY. How do we know we can trust what journalists write. Extrapolate this trend to the #fake news phenomena, the dumbing down of media by the “Mamma Mia” and the “Buzzfeed” (algorithm/click bait based journalism) and we hit the 2nd and 3rd cardinal rules
- We media consumers are dumbing down: in the long run will we even recognise quality
- There’ll be demand for quality – for a certain segment at least
Quality can not even be guaranteed in the business space – as evidenced by the number of requests on freelancer.com for someone to write 6 x 500 word articles per week for $3 each
With the absolute profusion of blogs, in & by themselves they are useless. No one will ever google the Change Tank, read the website, read an article or 2 and decide they are interested enough in them to come back & back. The way blogs have value are to either:
- enhance credibility for people who view for other reasons
(Still an iterative WIP)
Matthew