Topic: Blogging

            Blogging is a fairly recent phenomenon, only becoming mainstream in the last 25 years or so, though I believe the theory behind blogging has always been a popular one. There is a draw that we have as humans to look into other people’s lives and essentially see how our lives stack up. In the early 1910's it was termed “Keeping up with the Joneses” and I am sure we could find cave drawings from The Stone Age where Mr. Caveman drew his biggest and best hunting trophy to show to all his neighbors. The drive to care about where we fall is the reason tabloid magazines sell and it is the reason blogs are so popular.

              Everyone likes to put their best foot forward and blogging and other social media platforms have taken that idea to a whole new level. People have the ability to sit behind their computer screen and write about things that may or may not be true. I am betting you can find a “food blogger” out that that in reality hates cooking but takes great pictures and writes great intros to his/her recipes and is making lots of money so they keep creating content. I am guessing you can find a “mommy blogger” who has amazing pictures of her kids dressed perfectly, and a ridiculously clean house in the background who doesn’t tell you that she has a live-in nanny, housekeeper, and chef. But I don’t think we can really blame the bloggers, but rather the world that social media has created where those types of situations are accepted and expected but also revered.

              Phil La Duke an author by trade blogs about safety and published an article with  Entrepreneur.com titled “I Used Social Media and Blogging to Become Famous for Nothing.” He tells of being assigned by his company to start a blog and how he utilized not just blogging but Twitter and Facebook to get readers to his blog and to get other websites to pick up his content. He used keywords and data to make sure he was hitting the right demographic to grow his readership. Eventually he was asked to speak at events about Safety and was touted as one of the experts in his field just thru his blog. He was even invited to speak at a mining safety conference in Peru when he says “This despite my only knowledge of mining safety at the time was to stay the hell out of one.”

              What an interesting time we live in that someone can become an expert in their field even to the extent of being invited to speak on the topic when their only claim to the topic is the exposure that their own blog brought them. I said in my previous post that I don’t think social media is inherently bad or good and I feel the same way about blogging. There is a lot of good in it and I think when we look past social and lifestyle blogging we can see the benefits more clearly. Blogs are especially useful for businesses as marketing tools. Hubspot.com  provides a whole list of benefits of blogging for business and marketing. It can help drive traffic to your retail site, it can grow your business and ultimately make you money.

            When it comes down to it, I think it is important that we be transparent and upfront when we are the one doing the writing and when we are the one doing the reading we need to know that sometimes what we are reading isn’t always reality.