What Makes a Great Blog?
by Michelle ~ February 6th, 2011. Filed under: E-marketing.For the Google Online Marketing Challenge my group is working on a local Vancouver based clothing company Plenty (or Plen+y) with a flagship store in Kitsilano. Because their website does not currently offer online sales, their blog is the highlight of the website. This got me thinking, what makes a great blog?
According to the CMOs at Fortune 1,000 companies the #1 factor is that the blog postings always get comments. Keeping up-to-date with regular postings was also regarded as very important. What surprised me was how much lower in importance pictures/video ranked on the list…mostly because in my opinion it’s what makes a blog posting readable. Who wants to read a page full of text with no visuals to break up the monotony?
I definitely agree that regular postings are a must (I get disappointed when the blogs I follow don’t update at least every few days) but why is it necessary to have comments on the posts? According to the CMOs polled, blogs are generally more effective when they “produce a lively discussion rather than just pushing content out into the world”. Interesting perspective that I hadn’t thought of and it makes sense I just didn’t realize commentary was so highly regarded, but who am I to question the successful CMOs of the USA?
Bringing it back to Plenty, I thought their blog was pretty good with lots of pictures and links and semi-regular concise posts. However, they do seem to lack the engaged community that the CMOs deem so important. This poses yet another question: how do you engage the community?
Reference: What Makes for a Compelling Corporate Blog?