Most of the best bloggers are really just the best online community managers. They’ve used their blogs to be the beacon, or one of several beacons, of a bigger online community. ProBlogger does this brilliantly. Because of their success, companies believe they need to hire bloggers. They need good bloggers, maybe former journalists? They can write well. Maybe technical or design geniuses? They can create the best looking blogs on the internet.
The truth is something much more basic, it’s empathy. Or the ability to see hrough the eyes of their peers. That’s a darned-hard skill to quantify. You can’t point a potential client to a blog widget and shout “you see, they’re empathy is bigger and placed higher up the page than ours!”. Great blogs have almost nothing to do with SEO, design or the technical stuff and almost everything to do with giving an audience what they want. The SEO, design and the general buzz are by-products of writing for the audience.
So this is where it gets really tricky. Companies see a brilliant blog with lots of comments and racking up the sells. Then you hear the dreaded request: “we want that, but better”. But the blog is a single medium. In some cases it might be entirely unnecessary. Sometimes a forum works just fine, sometimes just churning out a white paper to the fifty members of a facebook group is brilliant. Maybe something as cost-effective as a twitter-stream is what a community of busy retail buyers want.
This blog is changing a little. It’s going to be about community management. I’ve done a little soul-searching and decided that’s where I see my career (and most of yours too) heading.
And since they don’t teach it at Uni, i’ve got less competition.
