So I went into this Rant with a friend of mine in discussing attitudes around Corporate Blogging as a marketing strategy…..sorry to do this to the rest of you, but here is an edited version.  (as background, this is to a person in Kent WA lamenting the lack of sites for Kent Station Kent WA, Compendium Blogwarefinding local information)  I of course suggested that the Small Businesses start Blogging as a solution….

....I’m an evangelist, yes....but about the Corporate blogging thing.  You and your peers are way to hung up on that.  Forget the term blogging if that makes it easier.

It’s a page just like any other page.  The only difference is that the content stays, is organized in reverse chronological order (which has too many benefits to even list) and it’s written by real human beings who are smart, passionate, care about what they are doing and of  course, the customer.   You can’t make someone do this...or assign it, you have to FREE people to do this.  

What you will see from the data (and this is a subtle way of saying forget what you or your peers think) is that the audience will tell you the truth by their actions.  It’s behavior that you monitor...past behavior is the best indication ever of future behavior...not what people say...what they do.

This is the beauty of the internet. there is NO ambiguity. Only the truth presented as data.
 
So back to the problem of finding anything in your city, think about the crowd trying to provide this information.

Who is doing this and why do they suck?   MyTravelGuide.com, the chamber of commerce (number two on the Restaurants, Kent WA search),  activediner.com, seattle times, citysearch.com, the post intelligencer, dinesite.com, tripadvisor.com, pubcrawler.com, allpages.com, merchantcircle.com, yelp.com, yellowpages.com, judy’sbook.com (which actually is the best idea out here and still sucks...but lets talk about it)   insiderpages.com, vegdining.com, yahoo.local.com,  gusto.com, blackent.com, yellowbot.com......I’m out of breath already....

So what is a successful evolution of  this going to look like?  What I like about the concept of blogging is the real person...What we are talking about isn’t an ad supported directory listing. I can find that anywhere.  A small business blog or even a Corporate or Enterprise blos has a personality, it’s populated and written by people who actually live and work in this community...they chose to raise their family here, they have burned the ships to try and make it on their own in a small business because they are passionate about: flowers, coffee, tutoring services, dry-cleaning, plumbing etc.....

Now tell me again if I do a search and land on a page like that vs. any one of 100 other look-alike directories I wouldn’t be thrilled?