Making your website a blog, or just adding one
October 13th, 2005Author: DialogueMedia
One of the main reasons that a business might want to start a blog these days is for relevance as far as search engine optimization goes. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with that, but there are some very important questions that should be asked before either creating a corporate blog or even making the “face” of your company’s website a blog – such as: Who’s going to write it? Does it have some “long term” viability? Are we just re-formatting content that is better placed elsewhere? Those are just a few of the questions we have to ask ourselves before helping a client make that decision.
However, there may be outside factors that come into play that could make the decision process a bit different – with a major one being whether the overall goals of the organization that is thinking of blogging need a running dialogue. Notice that I didn’t say running monologue, though. Case in point: Fred Wilson wrote today over on his blog, A VC, that the venture capital firm he is a part of, Union Square Ventures, has turned its website into a blog. Union Square Ventures was looking for more than just a bunch of static pages, some opportunities for discussion outside of just email or offline chats. This serves multiple purposes for them:
1) Letting people get a peek inside the heads of the VCs, on a regular basis
2) Attracting potential investment opportunities by showing thought leadership – to everyone
3) Keeping the Union Square Ventures website more relevant to search engines that look for frequent content updates
4) Educating those potential investment opportunities as to what the principals at the firm are really looking for, perhaps adding a higher level of preparation for those who are literally “asking for money.”
Sure, the firm’s site was great the way it was, and it was set up properly, looked clean, and we could go on for quite a while. But here, the market factor – the need for dialogue – superseded what might be a “no” answer to the question about repurposing content into a blog. If it hadn’t been thought through well enough by these obviously bright businessmen, they might have missed the boat – which Fred pretty much says they did by not doing this a year ago when the site launched.
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Tags: Blogging
