One of the many advantages of blogging is that a business blogger can easily find out what competitors and detractors are saying and refute it. And patrolling the blogosphere for those kinds of comments is easy with tools like Technorati and NetNewsWire.
For example, while hunting through Technorati’s vast tag cloud tonight, I found a post that offered an underhanded, snarky critique of our blogging expertise here at BBS disguised as a compliment. The ridiculous claim was that we don’t know how to permalink over here. To quote my favorite Beverly Hills Princess, Cher “Clueless” Horowitz, “As If!”
You know your competition is getting nervous when they have to make up stuff about you in order to find anything to criticize.
But I digress. The appropriate way to refute a post of this nature is to comment on it. Use your comment to set the record straight. Take my response to our critic:
In the interest of setting the record straight, I would like to point out that we do permalink at Blog Business Summit. Like any good business that knows blogging, we know that permalinking is one of the most important features of a blog because it keeps your content out there in the blogosphere and on the RSS feeds forever. To access the permalink for a post on our site, click on the date the post was created.
Glad you were so amused by Steve’s post. I found the whole thing laugh-out-loud funny myself. In the end, I had to conclude that the whole article was a publicity stunt by Forbes to get the blogosphere all heated up.
Then you come back to your blog and explain how and why your competitor or detractor is wrong, just like I have done with this post!
Next, you critique your detractor by mentioning - for example - that his permalinks don’t even look like permalinks because they’re in the title of the posts. As our own DL Byron says, “That’s usability 101, you don’t make a link not look like a link.”
Finally, you subscribe to your competitor or detractor’s RSS feed and use NetNewsWire to monitor all their future posting about your company, so that you can always be on top of them.
Take that, detractor!
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Darren 11.10.05 at 9:22 am
I’m not trying to validate the professional skills of either service, but let me disagree with you
First, three assumptions that I hope you’ll agree with:
Many (if not most) readers of blogs don’t know they’re reading something called a blog, or why it’s not just called ‘a web page’. Nor do they care.
Most readers of blogs don’t understand what the term ‘permalink’ means, nor do they particularly have any use for them.
That said, let’s go on to list four common permalinking strategies:
Permalink behind date - I used to do it this way, and it’s the lousiest strategy. Why? Because it implies something entirely different than what it means. To the average user, a linked date means nothing at all. If they’re going to draw any conclusions, they’re going to think ‘this will show me all the content from that day’. How could a user possibly conclude that a linked date indicates a permanent page for the content they’re reading?
Permalink labelled ‘permalink’ - See above on how few users understand and care about permalinks.
Permalinks behind headers - Not a great option, but not bad. Users are actually accustomed to clicking on headers to expose more information—see also Hotmail, Microsoft Outlook and Google. This is the approach I use because I don’t think my users care much about permalinks, and those who do understand the convention. Also, I prefer not to clutter up my entries with unnecessary stuff (permalinks, tags, etc). I’m definitely considering dumping my ‘E-mail this’ link for the same reason.
Permalink labelled ‘permanent link to this entry’ - Really, if permalinks are important to you and your readers, the best way to do it. A link that says exactly what it is. Jacob Nielsen would approve.
Teresa Valdez Klein 11.10.05 at 9:23 am
Thanks for your analysis of permalinking, I tend to agree that having links that say what they are is a good thing.
I also agree that on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most important feature to readers who just surf on in, that permalinking is probably about a 3.
But permalinking is a HUGE part of the underlying structure of what makes a blog a blog. It’s what makes the whole RSS feed/posts permanently in the blogosphere/linking to one another’s posts thing possible - and that’s really, really important.
So when the detractor - who incidentally has since removed my perfectly polite comment from his site - insinuated that we didn’t know how to permalink, I had to put things right.
-b- 11.10.05 at 9:24 am
Most important is to “make a link look like a link.” In any new medium, users will learn — we’re going on what, 8 years of permalinks? The old usability canards never answer what happens when the user figures out the conventions of the medium and they certainly do. See the horribly complex Amazon or eBay for proof of that. How does a user know that blue text is a link? Well, they click on it.
I’ll save the Jakob Nielsen flame for another day and the failings of usability assumptions.
Susan Reynolds 11.12.05 at 12:40 pm
You’ve provided me with some great material here. I’m on a quest to evangelize blogging among artists and along with that goes looking for good examples - not just about the nuts and bolts of blogging but also how (and why) to put various tools into practice.
Beyond making good points your delivery is upbeat and entertaining, which I appreciate. Thanks for being such an excellent resource as I work on putting together the new A Blog in the Oven Blog.
Susan Reynolds & the Artsy Asylum Studio
-b- 11.13.05 at 12:49 pm
Susan,
Nice work on your blog. It’s great to see diverse topics, especially with artists. Back in the day before it was called Blogging, we kept a journal of our internet art at Textura Design, my personal blog and company.