I blog, therefore I am

Ok, hardly worthy of Cartesian logic, but there is something to be said for the concept. If you are not creating content, and blogging is perhaps the best way to do so, then as far as the online world is concerned, you do not exist.

One of my leadership recently asked me to help unpack what a blog is conceptually. Certainly, at this point, we have all heard of them. But what makes a blog a blog, and perhaps more importantly what makes a good blog?

Well, it starts with the content of course, and answering questions is a great way to generate that content. So, taking my own advice, I have converted that question, ‘what is a blog?’ into a post itself. This way I can answer the question but continue to get ‘legs’ out of my work as more than one person might take advantage of it. This may be a bit pedestrian for many of our readers who are obviously more than familiar with the topic, but even for you it may add some perspective.

So, that being said, this is written in my bloggers voice. Understand that this is somewhat liberating. When I write, I don’t write for the consumer… in my opinion that is a part of the point. I don’t know who the consumer is (if ever the uncertainty principle applied…).

I write for myself. I assume that in so doing, I will be creating content that is attractive to people like myself. Good blogging has one key ; AUTHENTICITY/TRANSPARENCY. It is the antithesis of the ‘look at me I am great’ sales marketing that has dominated the last 50 years. You don’t put a post out there, you put YOURSELF out there, but it has to be the ‘real’ you.

I have heard of a REALTOR® that refers to themselves as ‘the gun loving, first amendment REALTOR.’ Branded across the top of their website in big bold letters. And I think that is brilliant. It is a niche, true, but obviously one that they are passionate about, and presumably one that struck a chord with someone just out there enough to think that was attractive as a quality in their REALTOR®. Is it likely to turn some people off? Absolutely.

The lesson to be learned here is that consumers are becoming, have become, very demanding of this sort of authenticity and transparency. Increasingly, expect consumers to have googled you, facebooked you, searched you on LinkedIn, and on, before ever contacting you (funny, this gives me a product idea).

A blog is short for weblog. Historically, A weblog is just a term created for things people like myself did – people with access to server space and time on their hands to start posting mainly text ‘blurbs’ about this or that. Funny little rants and jokes started to pop up in random places between websites. A list of your mp3 files was a very common early blog type. It didn’t take long for that to mutate into more serious efforts at humor, social commentary, politics, business and other forms of ‘conversation’ started to appear online, and Weblog quickly got shortened to ‘blog.’

A blog is a web page, or a web site (a page sits on a site, and a site can contain many pages). Taking our example, psyne.net, we have a blog site. There are currently many posts on that site. As Mark and I have generated content, especially around a particular theme, that in itself could rightly be called a ‘blog.’ As in ‘got to psyne.net and read my blogs on SEO and SEM.’ The ‘blog’ has become both a loose term for the site, for a post, and within a site for a particular genre or collection of content.

There are many different types of webpages, and many different types of websites containing those pages. What makes a blog a blog is the type of content it contains. Blogs tend to be informational, sometimes opinionated, occasionally even rantlike. Blogs also tend to be theme oriented, though often the theme is simply ‘this is what is on my mind today.’ That is what is referred to as a diary blog. It is basically just that, a diary kept online. For our purposes, the theme will obviously be professional education for REALTORS®, but understand that the proposed blog would be very different from what a practitioner themselves might want to maintain. In short, there are many types of blogs.

Blogs tend to cycle their content. A website may change its ‘index’ or home page content periodically or even frequently, but the vast majority of the content and links are somewhat ‘fixed’ or static. Blogs, on the other hand, traditionally show the most recent story on top, and allow the reader to descend into the site by category or date or other factors. There can certainly be links on the main or index page of a blog site, but typically the primary content of that page will cycle out as new content comes in. Visit Inman.com and stop to think, are you looking at a website, or a weblog? In my opinion Inman.com looks and feels like a very sophisticated blog, that happens to have an editorial staff and professional as well as use contributed content. They manage to maintain just enough of that conversational style, while still being professional journalists.

Blogs tend to be primarily text, as they are often creating train of thought and represent a textual conversation with the reader. One fascinating thing about this conversation is that it can be bidirectional, as opposed to traditional media. I cannot easily comment on or respond to an article in the newspaper, certainly not in real time. I can do so on a blog, the moment the story is posted. Or, on a blog site that allows users to add their own content, I can create my own post – my own user contributed content.

One of the reasons that blogs are primarily text is that they usually employ a website interface to create the posted content. This is perhaps the easiest way to distinguish conceptually between a webpage and a weblog. A webpage typically involves at least a small amount of skill and effort to create and maintain. A weblog in the modern era of blogs typically takes no skill or effort to maintain. You just type and click and it is on the web. That is because nearly all blogs today are using a blogging platform to create their content.

A blogging platform, like wordpress, is itself just web software that builds a simple database and interface for you, the blogger. When you click ‘publish’ after typing your content, your content is converted into a webpage for you. Most editors offer moderate formatting capabilities, and the ability to insert pictures and videos, but ultimately you are within a fairly structured software environment, and cannot stray too far from the happy path. This is very different from the world of a webmaster, who can create content where there was none using tools that are not online and will not offer a templated solution.

So, rather than trying to waste time making things ‘pretty,’ a blog platform like wordpress (which is powering BayAreaRealtorEducation.com) makes them pretty for you, and you can just focus on your expertise. Converting your expertise easily into desirable, searchable, consumable web content is precisely what good blogging is all about.

If you think about it, wikipedia, the premiere online encyclopedia, is really nothing more than a qualifed set of blogs. In this case users have contributed explanations and definitions for terms, concepts, etc., and an ‘official’ version of the wiki entry has evolved in an organic fashion. User contributed content is an essential part of a good blogging experience. Posts are often intentionally interrogative, or even challenging, to engage participation and commentary… a well posed question can create very interesting potentials for interaction. Many early blog posts in the real estate realm were admittedly made in response to questions that real estate practitioners had seeded themselves under aliases. The reason is that there is something provocative about the Q & A process, and of course a well timed response lends a great deal of credibility and appeal.

So, to boil it down to a few practical examples. A members blog site might highlight particular knowledge that they have, or highlight things to look for and things to avoid. I advise people to take questions or examples they get in their trade and blog them. Have a disastrous scenario? Get what value you can from it, and write a somewhat self mocking ‘don’t let this happen to you story’. Someone asks you whether they think interest rates will go up or down (e.g. is this a good time to buy)… rather than trying to formulate an answer to this complex question, I would suggest they say that this is such an interesting question that they will have to write their response in a blog. If one person is asking the question, there are certainly more out there, so the philosophy becomes to put your wisdom where your website is, and post that content, that knowledge, online.

So, if you are not blogging, here is the easy way to get started; take the questions and feedback that you receive, and write about it. Find relevant current events and issues that have lead-ins to your professional services and expertise, and write about them. Another example; when I heard on the radio on my drive home recently that the first baby boomer had retired, by the time I got home this post was already written in my head.

The topic, the question, the mishap, the comical event, begs the post. This is the key to blogging. It is not contrived content, for the most part. Most of the best blogs are somewhat raw content, written train of thought. That being said, there is something to be said for spell checking and including some editing and organization, and relevant imagery is very powerful (I suspect that in part the good use of imagery is why this post on imaging and surface computing is far and away the most consumed post I have written, and bizarrely growing, not shrinking, in daily readership). But this also raises another critical point and illuminates why blogging is so powerful. That post had several score readers in September when it was posted. Slightly more in October, then down a few in November. Total readership by december 1 was still less than 200. Then somehow, somewhere, it got syndicated. For most of december it was being read by 50 people a day. Content that I thought had already run its course suddenly started to yield big results, and december will see that particular post read by nearly a thousand people.

Blogs will become the journalism of the future. This is both a good and a bad thing. It is a good thing in that it gives us all the power to exercise our voice, raw and uncensored, across the planet. It is a bad thing in that it gives us all the power to exercise our voice, raw and uncensored, across the planet. This is a factor worth considering as you mull this over. If the content isn’t interesting, compelling, controversial… something, then there is not much point.

How to get started blogging? Well, it starts with writing, in your style, your voice, about something… My suggestion would be to watch the headlines. Pick something you know something about, and express that knowledge in the form of an opinion. One of my counterparts in the industry, and occasional co-author in other venues, exclaimed loudly that a post I wrote recently, essentially as a rant in reaction to a Yahoo news story, is far and away the best thing I have ever written.

I tend to disagree, but that is precisely what the blogger needs to avoid. Write yourself, let the audience figure it out.

CCAR is in the process of developing a blogging and internet marketing course. If you are interested, please feel free to drop me a line.

[Originally printed on 12/29/2007 - reprinted with permission RealtyRoot.com]

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I blog, therefore I am

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