Every now and then I use Google Reader’s recommend function to find me a list of blogs I might add to my feeds. My list of regular feeds changes over time so it’s good to reach out for new content based on what I’ve been reading lately. When I did that today, Google Reader recommended the Puffin Blog.
I hadn’t come across this one before but, despite my interest in young adult fiction, I will not be adding the Puffin Blog to my feeds. This is an example of the all-too common “blog as marketing channel”. Most companies fail dismally at this, and publishers are no exception.
You can spot a “blog as marketing channel” a mile away. Firstly, there are no comments. A blog is a social media platform. You know it’s achieving its purpose when you can see evidence of social behaviour, of conversation, of engagement. Regardless of how many people may be subscribed to your RSS feed, if you’ve got zero comments your readers don’t care enough to engage with your content or with you. That’s bad news for a company hoping to use a blog to reach out to customers. It’s also a waste of time and resources.
Another telling feature of the blog as marketing channel is the ubiquityof product mentions. On publisher blogs, this means almost every post is a book plug. Sometimes this is dressed up with witty banter or disguised within a personal anecdote by a company executive. Sometimes, in an attempt to show that the organisation is staffed by real, flesh and blood humans, you’ll see a variety of employees posting, everyone from the book designer to the receptionist. You’ll rarely see real analysis or opinion, or a sense of the company’s understanding of its place within a community of customers, readers, authors, and industry players. The result is pervasive sense of PR fluff and lightweight content.
It used to be common wisdom that content is king. But the popularity of social media has demonstrated that what internet users are really seeking is connection. A blog may be a cheap and easy way of publishing web content but its biggest strength is that it is a platform for conversation.
Are there publisher blogs that get it? Over at the 26th Story, I think HarperStudio has understood the opportunity and challenge of a company blog very well. There is real opinion, meaningful engagement with issues relevant to the HarperStudio brand and active encouragement of community discussion. The same is true of Soft Skull News and Abbeville Manual of Style.
These are blogs that still manage to showcase their authors and upcoming titles, but also maintain a place in a lively community of readers and other bloggers. Most importantly, these bloggers realise that conversation is taking place everywhere simultaneously. There’s no way to control it, only to participate in it. I don’t need to take a sneaky-peek at these blogs’ Google Analytics results to know they’re more effective than a “blog as marketing channel” promo site.
Kate Eltham is a writer and creative industries professional based in Brisbane, Australia. She is Chief Executive Officer of 
kate.eltham {at} gmail.com
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree. Nothing is mre of a turn off on the web than a shameless marketing blog. It’s 2009 folks-time to get real.
Hi Kate. Happy New Year – and what a true observation!
I by no means coined this expression, but the easy distinction to make is between a blog – and a “flog”. Most publisher blogs don’t graduate beyond flogging, and often suffer from the self-conscious “hello world” tone of voice that accompanies someone (perhaps a young, “savvy” intern) being pushed out into centre stage (or at least – feeling like they have!) responsible for creating a valuable community of user generated content. And then the bosses wonder why their web strategy didn’t “work” and go back to spending cash on print ads…
There are pockets of non-failure tho – I was very impressed (and again, not alone) by the unexpectedly human and non-corporate Little Brown twitter:
https://twitter.com/littlebrown
although I hope they were recommending / match-making books that weren’t – just – their own.
I also stay subscribed to the UK Penguin blog:
http://thepenguinblog.typepad.com/
although they do do a fair amount of flogging, they also seem to feel just a bit guilty about it.
And the digitalist is less of a flog or a blog than a set of links punctuated by the odd really rather good post:
http://thedigitalist.net/
and I used to enjoy the CharkinBlog by their former CEO, Richard Charkin.
We (my company, Apt) have also built blogs for publishers, usually because we recommend this as a cheap entry point for the web; the reasoning being that if you can’t get a blog right after 6-12 months, better to know that (and change it) than to have spent a load of cash on a more complex site that you can’t handle either. Fail cheaply etc.
But I do wonder what it is about publishers that mans they don’t get it right that often. (Clearly I agree with you about Soft Skull and 26th Floor, who I am happy to see are delighted to stick their necks out) Do other industries? Or is it the fact that “blogging” falls to busy marketing/PR bodies who are culturally tuned to sending out press releases and moving to the next item in the publishing schedule?
Thanks for listing the 3 blogs that you like. I visited them and bookmarked all three.
Great post. Serves ‘em right! I agree about HarperStudio’s doing a great job with Twitter too… always interesting stuff.
Yep… the marketing only blogs time has come and gone and hopefully never comes again. Soft Skull are legends and always have been, publishing incredible work across a variety of genres… even poetry which always makes me smile! Must check out 26th Story and Abbeville Maunal of Style.
Peter, I agree with you about starting with blogs as a web entry point, in fact I have started saying to authors that they’re better off with a blog than with the traditional author site which is usually static brochureware that is rarely updated. Blogs are not just cheaper and easier, they are MORE effective, or at least the RSS feed is.
It’s a really interesting question about why more publishers don’t get it right. I’m sure if we look at other industries we’ll see similiar patterns. I’d guess it’s more to do with organisational culture. The three positive examples I mentioned above are smaller, more independent teams with smaller resources. They need to reach out to the community at large, so they understand the opportunities inherent in social media. (HarperStudio is part of a multinational company, but is operating under a newer entrpreneurial model) Perhaps large corporations aren’t as capable of understanding how to act within an online community, and how this changes a company’s thinking about interacting with customers.
Also, any company that thinks of a blog purely as a marketing function is doomed to failure. Not because marketing execs can’t be successul at multi-threaded conversation with their markets. It’s because marketing is not often part of the production chain until the vey end, especially in publishing companies. It’s too late to think about the implications for your company of blogging and participating in social media only after you’ve produced a book.
Oh, and thanks for mentioning The Digitalist, you’ve absolutely right! I’ve stayed subbed to The Penguin Blog too, they do manage an authentic voice and, overall, I remain impressed by Penguin’s ability to leverage it’s own brand.
An analog to the marketing blog is the publicitycast — the publisher podcast that isn’t aimed at any particular kind of reader but is simply all about the publisher. Boring…..
Thanks for your kind words about our blog–our goal is to provide our readers content that’s uniquely identifiable with, and related to, our books and brand. Hopefully the result is entertaining as well as a little bit different from anything else out there.
We’re enjoying Electric Alphabet, too, and are adding it to our list of links. Thanks again!
- The Abbeville Manual of Style Team
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