AUDIENCE(50)

Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything. Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos from your browser, photo, desktop, email or wherever you happen to be.

Tumblr ushered blogging into the mobile age by developing easy-to-use smartphone and tablet apps that enable blogging on the go—and by allowing fellow Tumblr users to follow each other. This, combined with the ability to both push Tumblr content to other channels (via Facebook, Twitter, and other sharing) and pull content into Tumblr from other channels (such Twitter and Instagram), frees creators to both blog and promote their blog any way they see fit.

Tumblr’s major unknown is how its users will react to Yahoo!’s efforts to monetize the service. If they embrace it, Tumblr could emerge as a do-it-all environment to build SEEKERS, AMPLIFIERS, and JOINERS via both free and paid advertising. If not, it could become the next GeoCities—a $3.57 billion acquisition that Yahoo! made in 1999, only to shutter it in 2009.4 Only time will tell.



If you, your teammates, or executives have any trepidation about “the right way to blog,” rest assured that there is no single right way. Just take a quick look at these blogs and you’ll see that they are as different as can be:

Consumer Goods

Fiskars Fiskateers Blog (http://www.fiskateers.com/blog/)

Tesla Blog (http://www.teslamotors.com/blog)

Financial

American Express Open Forum (www.openforum.com)

MintLife (https://www.mint.com/blog/)

Food

Butterball Blog (http://butterballblog.wordpress.com/)

McDonald’s Let’s Talk (http://community.aboutmcdonalds.com/)

Industrial

Caterpillar On the Level (https://caterpillar.lithium.com/caterpillar/)

GE Reports (http://www.gereports.com/)

Publishing

BBC News Editors Blog (www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs/the_editors/)

BoingBoing (www.boingboing.net)

Real Estate

Realtor.com Blog (www.realtor.com/blogs/)

The Zillow Blog (www.zillowblog.com)

Retail

The Apron from Home Depot (http://ext.homedepot.com/community/blog/)

The Bass Pro Shops Blog (http://blogs.basspro.com/)

Software

Google Official Blog (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/)

The ExactTarget Blog (www.exacttarget.com/blog)

Travel

The Disney Parks Blog (http://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/)

Nuts About Southwest (http://www.blogsouthwest.com/)



Blogging can be a great way to build SEEKERS, AMPLIFIERS, and JOINERS via content that you create and control. But be warned: It takes commitment. It is preferable to have no blog at all than one you haven’t updated in years—and that may scare off SEEKERS of current information.

SNAPSHOT: BLOGS

FIRST APPEARANCE: Justin Hall (@jah) is credited as creating the first blog (Links.net) in 1993; however, the term web log would not be coined until 1997 or shortened to blog until 1999.

PPOPRIETARY AUDIENCES: SEEKERS as well as AMPLIFIERS and JOINERS.

AUDIENCES: Very effective means to build SUBSCRIBERS, FANS, and FOLLOWERS.

EFFORT REQUIRED: Moderate to high depending on volume of content production.

WHO OWNS THE DATA: You own all the content you post unless your blog software terms of service state otherwise.

BLOG SERVICES: Blogger (owned by Google), Compendium, LiveJournal, TypePad, Tumblr (owned by Yahoo!), Weebly, WordPress, and others.

USERS WORLDWIDE: Difficult, if not impossible, to quantify number of bloggers and blog readers. Suffice it to say that blogs have the same potential reach of any website—any and all Internet users.

SKILLS REQUIRED: Basic coding, copywriting, design, and SEO.

GATEKEEPERS: Search engines (primarily Google)

STRENGTHS: Blogs provide instantaneous, worldwide distribution of any content including text, images, audio, and video.

Easy-to-use blog software makes it feasible for anyone—technical or not—to blog.

Linear post structure (most recent to least recent with post title, tags, and links) makes content very search-engine friendly.

Easy to integrate email and RSS opt-in forms as well as social media widgets to enable likes, tweets, and shares.

CHALLENGES: While anyone can blog, not many do with the frequency and quality necessary to grow their SEEKER audience.

Absent your development of blog JOINERS (particularly email and RSS SUBSCRIBERS), your blog is dependent on the whims and interests of direct, search, and social SEEKERS.

a A portmanteau is a word formed by combining two words to form a single word that works in place of the two. By using it in this book, I receive both a triple-word score and the undying gratitude of the Portmanteau Preservation Society of America.

1. Andrew Sullivan, “Why I Blog,” The Atlantic, November 1, 2008, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/11/why-i-blog/307060/2/.

2. Farhad Manjoo, “Flash: Blogging Goes Corporate,” Wired, May 9, 2002, www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2002/05/52380.