You heard me.
I’ve been doing this “internet” thing for awhile now. And I’ve arrived at one ultimate conclusion.
If you have a commerical website and you don’t have a blog, you need a time machine.
Here’s why. Part of my job–and personal pasttimes–is to link relevant content on the web. We make pages. We make sites. We make forums and communities. We share photos, stories, information and programs. And we want to link all this stuff to you. That’s right. We think your enterprise (whatever it may be) is so interesting, the people who land on our site need to see it.
But if you don’t have a blog to tell us why it’s interesting, it ends up not seeming very interesting.
Sure, you could have a whole page to tell me why I need to use your site. But if its not dynamic, I don’t care. You probably just hired a contractor to write it, somebody who doesn’t even know your company. I assure you, it won’t be fuzzy and heart-wrenching and intimate and compelling. Plus, I have a hunch that page is never going to chage, so when I visit it next week, I’m going to read the same thing again.
I want to know that your company is changing. And growing. And following the times, and cutting-edge, and hip with the kids.
I want to hear about how you spilled coffee on your crotch on your way to work, how you barely made the bus, how you came up with the idea for a brilliant new t-shirt design by spacing out on a popsicle stick.
I want to know that I’m investing in real people who are like me, because sometimes they get mixed up between saying “how’s it going” and “how are you” and end up saying “how you going,” or sometimes they get called by collection agencies at inappropriate times, or sometimes they spend a whole day trying to get their computer to work and finally fix it and have to stay up until 1:00AM the next day to finish their job and end up getting bad diner coffee in the middle of the night which gives them indigestion but they do it all anyway.
I want you to blog.
But if you don’t have time to blog, don’t worry; I’ll just visit and link to people who do.