D-R-E-A: Driven. Resourceful. Energetic. Artistic

I know that blogs have been around for quite some time now, but I never got into them that much. But, when I became a Peer Mentor, I had no choice but to enter the blogosphere. To match my dry wit, cynicism, and overall indifference towards blogging, the very first blog that I wrote was a carefully crafted critique of how blogging made us all so very self-important and that it was another way to embrace the wonders of self-expression. A year has passed since then and my opinion of personal blogs have not changed: blogs are just like that annoying friend that you have on Facebook that clutters up your news feed with nonsensical, trivial posts bitching about their lack of life. Except it’s worse seeing as how blogs have no character limit; so people are free to bitch and moan all they want in the hopes that someone, ANYONE, will care about their existence.

And I know that what I just said was rather harsh, but that is my opinion coming from personal experience. Personal blogs are public diaries and, for most people, can be seen as annoying and unnecessary. However, our perceptions of blogs gets inverted whenever a company or business executive has one.

As funny as this inverted perception is, it makes sense.  Blogs are how professional identities establish opinion leadership. Posts show how well-versed they are in their fields, how they stand out from their competitors, and that they have an actual voice and identity beyond being a logo or company name. People pay very close attention to what these blogs say. And companies know this so they publish material in such a way to cater to what they want the public to read. In order to reach out to their readers, companies position their blogs in such a way that will get more hits.  How do they do that? Through search of course!

Materials published in blogs have such a huge impact on searching rankings, including PageRank. This is a great method for companies or executives to dominate SERPs by homing in on specific keywords. Targeted keywords go after the niche audiences that companies will have a better chance at connecting to than broad user bases. Also, if an article is a really in-depth and informative piece, some readers may just link back to the article by posting it on their own sites which will also increase the rankings of the site. When a company publishes a blog post and the link is automatically  in a social media news feed, other users will no doubt re-post of the piece is of a high enough caliber. Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and every single social media outlet you can think of drives up those search rankings too.

All of this brings me back to what I had stated in the beginning about the annoying Facebook friend. The most important aspect company blogs have to take into consideration (besides quality of posts) is the TIMING. It is ungodly annoying to witness the same person prattle on and on about the same garbage. Friends like that get deleted from my newsfeed since I have better things to do than to read about their melodrama. So companies, don’t be the annoying Facebook friend and clog up our newsfeed with dumb posts. Give us something worthwhile