These days, not being on Twitter or having some sort of online presence at all is the equivalent of being in another country without your passport, luggage or any clothes at all. It makes people prick up their eyebrows and ears and look at you with an expression that says, “What are you doing here?”
Similarly, blogging is now part of the lingua franca of the Internet. It isn’t mandatory, but it’s a good idea. As the Duct Tape Marketing blog puts it: “If you’re tired of hearing about blogging, think it’s a dying fad or that it’s not for you, that’s totally fine. Just make sure you are consistently producing and sharing high quality content that is searchable, subscribable and indexable and house it all on your company’s domain.”
But blogging is a good idea. It’s not that tough and can be a good way of giving a company or corporation many faces and many voices to help make your business more than, well, just a business. The aforementioned blog has a handful of reasons making the case for why you should be blogging, and, rather than paraphrase or rattle them all off here, I’ll capitalize on a few I think are especially hard to ignore.
One of them is how it offers a hub for social media: “Creating awareness for blog content that addresses challenges and provides useful information is the best way to build relationships through social media and one of the best ways to then attract links and traffic.”
That’s absolutely true. Rather than shoveling links for your social-media stuff everywhere on your site, aggregating them on each blog post makes sense. It lets people become inadvertent evangelists for your cause, issuing links back to you and your content -- it isn’t exactly like people are going to tweet links out to your company’s amazing “contact us” page, now, are they?
Read more about Duct Tape’s blogging advice here.
David Wolinsky is a freelance writer and a lifelong Chicagoan. In addition to currently serving as an interviewer-writer for Adult Swim, he's also a comedy-writing instructor for Second City. He was the Chicago city editor for The Onion A.V. Club where he provided in-depth daily coverage of this city's bustling arts/entertainment scene for half a decade. When not playing video games for work he's thinking of dashing out to Chicago Diner, Pizano's, or Yummy Yummy. His first career aspirations were to be a game-show host.
