When we talk to potential clients that have an eye on the blogosphere, the overwhelming majority of them want to know a lot of things before they start blogging. One of the big questions that comes up is, “who is going to read this thing, anyway?”
When starting a blog, it’s very important to know your target audience. You need to have a good sense of why you’re blogging and who you’re doing it for, or you’ll come across as broadly inauthentic. I suspect that this general lack of direction is part of the problem with Southwest Airlines’ new blog, but I can’t be certain without having a look at their game plan.
Anyway - the recent report put out by BlogAds paints an interesting if not wholly scientific portrait of the blogospheres. I say “blogospheres” because this report presents some compelling evidence that not all blog readers are the same. This is something that we’ve long known to be true, but there is a tendency among researchers to clump all blog readers together - so it’s good to see the folks at BlogAds getting the story right.
The take-home lesson here is that you can’t just target your blog at the “blogosphere” in general and hope that the right kind of readers will drift your way. You can’t even say, “this blog is for our customers, employees, friends, and enemies.” It’s just too broad. You have to figure out what your company hopes to achieve by blogging. How does it fit into your efforts to reach out to your customers? Your employees?
Like Anil Dash said in his talk at our Los Angeles seminar (summary here, slides here) the next generation of blogs will have even smaller, more specific audiences. We’re going to see companies building multiple blogs for multiple constituencies - a continuation of The Long Tail phenomenon we’re already seeing.
Via The Blog Herald
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