The ROI of blogging
I was in a discussion last week regarding the cost / benefit of blogs. The original point made was this …
The problem we have today is how to filter out the noise. Computers and especially the internet have made it possible for the billions of people to make a whole lot of noise. Before the Internet, only a few people made noise and only a few at a time. Information came from books, magazines, newspapers, and Television. Today, with the rise of social networking, blogs, facebook, twitter, etc. the signal to noise ration has dropped to near zero.
How do you justify the time spent looking at these sites on the random chance there will be something of value ?
I agree that there are lots of blogs published by individuals and somewhat less published by groups such as this blog. There are far more blogs than I will ever discover, let alone consume. Further, there are many that would be highly valuable to the work I do and yet I have not found them, and may never find them. Of the blogs I have found, they are a diverse spectrum, running the spectrum of mostly business or topical content to mostly personal content. How do I get to the information I need ? I read blogs like people read the newspaper 20 years ago.
Before mass access to the Internet, news was brought together from many sources, formatted with a title, introductory paragraph, and then a detailed article. The “USA Today” was the evolution of the model, making scanning of the newspaper a quick five minute activity over a cup of coffee or on a commuter train. Of an entire newspaper, the average reader might scan 80% of the titles, read 10% of the overviews, and only a small number of full articles. Readers of the Wall Street Journal chose that newspaper for it’s more focused content and as such, the hit rates might have been somewhat higher.
Blogs are much like sections of the newspaper. Different blogs have different authors and those authors specialize their content. When you add a number of blogs together, you have something comparable to a newspaper. The big difference is the reader decides the sources of content and not an editor in chief. So, how do you build this personal newspaper ?
A feed reader or “aggregator” lets the reader choose the sources and decide on the layout and amount of content provided. There are even internet services such as FeedJournal to make the experience just like a newspaper (without the advertizing flyers). The trick (or challenge) is in finding the content.
Readers find blog content by trial and error but this is no different than finding content 20 years ago. The only difference is in how much content there is to find. The Internet has made much more content available. Fortunately, the Internet has also made it much faster to sort through all of that content. Better still is that the ratios between pre-Internet and today for content vs search and filter are in the reader’s favor. It takes very little effort to subscribe to new content, reduce the low value material, eliminate the no-value material, and filter to fit your available time and interests.
If you treat reading blogs and other published internet content much like the newspaper, it is a quick and easy way to stay updated on information relevant and of interest to “you.”
FYI – we’ll tackle the questions “Why should I blog ?” and “Why should I let my workers blog ?” in a future post.
