Immediacy, Truth, and Loyalty

Blogging works.   But often I'm not sure even top bloggers know why, and convincing skeptics is often difficult without facts to back up claims of blogging success.  There are, however, three very tangible reasons why blogging is so effective: immediacy, truth, and loyalty.  These are three elusive properties of sites which have been pursued by all good website designers for the past decade.

Immediacy.  Blogs, more than any other online medium, make it obvious that content is either current, or not.  If you go to a blog, and quickly scan the posting dates and headlines, you know almost immediately whether or not the author is dedicated to frequent communication.  In conventional websites, this is very hard to do unless you are CNN and immediacy is part of your core business.  Many sites try techniques such as displaying the date of the last update, but we know many of those are ficticious, and only visitors who are already loyal can really tell the difference from day to day.  Even if you go to a site frequently, creating the feeling of "constant change" is hard to do, and it's just as bad to overdo it (which looks like hype) as underdo it (stagnation).  Blogs make it simple, and it works better than any other "web site genre" I've seen.

Truth.  Blogs encourage "transparency of authorship".  When you go to a blog, you expect to find an individual who is the author.  You expect to find details about them (if you're interested).  The blogosphere has trained you that a pseudonym or "corporate identity" is a warning sign.  The truth value of such blogs is instantly demoted.  This credibility is essential.  You need to see it in the posting style, the "about" page", and in the genuine interaction of those who comment and link to the site.  Truth and transparency are the new buzzwords of corporate communications and marketing, and blogs do it best.

Loyalty.  Take immediacy, add truth, and visitors have an instant inclination to loyalty.  That's always been true.  But blogs add the missing link: RSS subscriptions.  Web designers try desparately to capitalize on that inclination with mailing lists, forums, competitions, and other mechanisms.  But, RSS creates a direct channel between author and audience that is unrivaled.  Because blogs do this so well, their loyalty groups grow more quickly.  Without syndication, all a web designer has is word-of-mouth and Google.  But, RSS brings with it tagging, blogrolls, sites like Technorati.  All of these are technical multipliers of the word-of-mouth effect.

I'll bet when most people visit websites they find relevant to their purpose, their brain is instantly trying to assess how current the site is (immediacy), how truthful it is, and making a decision if they'll ever come back (loyalty).  With most sites, this is a hard decision.  So hard that many people just "click away".  With blogs, it's virtually an instant assessment, and an intuitive one.  That's why they work.

In a recent posting by Scoble (one of blogging's superstars), he realized he needed to learn to hone his rhetoric:

The common theme I'm hearing is Werner (and the other Amazon employees who commented here, and elsewhere that I'm seeing) want numbers. They want statistics. Proof. Science.

It's true.  It is difficult to convey things with anecdotal stories of success, as Robert did in a recent meeting with Amazon.  Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon) was unimpressed.  I can see why.  Werner is a real numbers guy, and I know Robert's style of enthusiasm is hard to swallow for certain types of people.  But, Robert is right, and his anecdotal stories are real representations of success.

I think the best premise for people like Werner is to argue that blogs are nothing other than extremely effective websites.  Skip the evangelism about "the conversation".  Though it might be interesting, and even real, it detracts from the firm message about why blogs are effective.  They're effective because, in their current form, they build an audience by using a rare combination of immediacy and truth, coupled with unprecedented ways to cement the loyalty of that audience.

Contrasts need be be drawn so people can see this more clearly:

1. How effective is your mailing list?  How clean is it?  How much control do subscribers have of what they get?  And, how often do you use it?  If you contrast most mailing lists with RSS, RSS will win hands down by just tallying the answers.  RSS wins.
2. How do you know what your visitor's think?  Surveys?  Market research?  Compare blog comments and the transparency of such communication with more conventional web mechanisms.  With the exception of a few enormously dedicated market research efforts, blog comments will win this game, especially for smaller organizations that need to be more agile.  Comments win.
3. Don't focus on things like "hits, visitors, and sessions" but rather effectiveness ratios.  Blogs may not have higher visitor counts than well-marketed websites.  But, you can bet that their ratio of "engaged visitors" to "casual visitors" is higher.  Finding numbers to support this may be hard.  Tools like Feedburner can help by redefining statistics in terms of "circulation" and slicing numbers differently.  Blogs will win most "effectiveness ratio" arguments by the numbers, if you can manage to collect them.

Some of this is hard.  I've done KPIs for sites many times, and slicing and dicing numbers to prove a point can sometimes be harrowing.  As a blogger, I know intuitively that what I'm saying is true.  But I also have had the same failures of rhetoric Robert describes and know that in the end, a more potent analysis is needed so that people can understand whether blogging will work for them.

A year and a half ago, I was skeptical myself.  But, if I've learned anything over that time, it's that blogs are not a new, amazing gadget which reinvents the web.  They simply do what we've always known we need to do online, and they do it very, very well.

 

Comments

[Jack Lund]

I'm just starting a blog site.The reason? I have some deep convictions and have been unable to engage. Why? truth is abstract, takes thinking, attention and an open mind.

The Blog is an open invitation to engagement. That is what makes it so unique. If someone shows an interest we can have a meal together so to speak, and have mutual discovery.