Many skilled and experienced marketing professionals do not yet understand that the blog structure is the killer SEM enabled content management system. I know first hand what it means to misperceive blogging software. Though AIMCLEAR mashes up chunks of blog functionality behind many websites we work with, it took a few years to become personally committed to blogging.
The truth is that bloggers pioneered software and linking methods which socialized the interconnected grid of links and content. Blogging communication tools, laid over the Internet, have helped maximize the social promise of http protocol. Blog-style tools are ubiquitous in nearly all online social communities.
We build blog software hybrids to facilitate feed marketing, content management, hosting community dialog, interactions with social websites, and for blog powered online media rooms. It makes tons of sense. These pockets of functionality are easily available to mash up from open source software like WordPress and integrate easily with traditional website structures.
Most Corporate Types are Slow to Accept.
You would have thought that someone (like me) who was Creative Services Director for a Minnesota CBS affiliate, founded and directed the Interactive division of a venerable Duluth advertising agency, coded hybrid CRM and analytic software packages, placed millions of dollars of pay per click, designed hundreds of websites, and has been optimizing for 10 years MIGHT get blogs early. Nope….
Not me, I learned slowly. Like many of our clients, it took a while to understand the incredible power of managing content by posts, categories, authors, tags, blogrolls, pingbacks, trackbacks, and pages. It’s so simple. It’s so deep. It’s so relevant. Yet for the first few years of the blogging phenomena I simply did not understand the concept bloggers have been on to for years. I perceived blogs as a craze or some cyclical phase. Not true…
The Blogs Grid within the Web.
Bloggers are the ones who first figured out and taught us how to take the web “social.” Links are one of the main measures of authority on the Internet. Since a link is a recommendation search engines like Google assess the value of any given website in part by the count and quality of sites that link in. Links carry a lot of weight.
Blogs Make Giving and Receiving Links is Easy.
Whereas “hyperlinking” has always been a fundamental premise of the World Wide Web, with the advent of blogs it has never been so easy. At first in the early 90’s website management lived in the rarified domain of IT gods. Linking to another site involved CODE. The very technical skill of even creating a site was the stuff of mythical heroes. Getting a new link onto a corporate website involved memos, meetings, dreaded HTML, and took some time.
Then with the advent of WYSIWYG programs like Adobe PageMill, Front Page, Net Objects Fusion, UltraDev, GoLive, and the Dreamweaver, the “webmaster” was born. The new hybrid skill set of creative services and IT was the 1990’s model and high school students first started making websites in their bedrooms. Linking got easier.
Now Links Are Easy.
71 million people, who use blogging software that children easily handle, give out “link love” every second of every day. All social media sites and tools somehow mirror the physical world. Blogs paved the way by creating a system that morphed interlinked websites into an analogy for next-gen human interactions. if you know a site that has somthing cool to say you link to it.
Bloggers who know what to do speak to each other through pingbacks and trackbacks and hundreds of other subtle methods of leaving and finding breadcrumbs as they travel the net. Still your ability to garner and give links is a basic measure of your website’s authority. Blog software functionality is the millennial tool designed to easily do just that. Make sure that your website is plugged into the blog linking grid.
