Down With (Business) Blogs
By: Lori Hoffman
I hate the word blog. Not in the same way that I hate the word content (that’s a story for another day), but I would like to see us find a different word for the stories, articles, research, whatever, that companies put on their websites. And it’s why LaunchSquad’s newly refreshed website has a resources section, not a blog. But, why are we even having this conversation, you might be asking. Who cares? Well words matter, and words should change when they’re no longer relevant.
But let’s start with a little history. The first blog—or weblog—was posted more than 27 years ago, the same year that brought us Mariah Carey’s Dreamlover and Michael Jordan’s first retirement. It was around the same time that Yahoo! was founded and we (if “we” were old enough or lucky enough to have access to a computer) most likely browsed the World Wide Web on Netscape. Blogs were almost always personal, public musings on, well, anything. By 2006 there were about 35 million blogs. Five years later that number ballooned to 173 million (that’s not even counting Vlogs of course). By 2005-2006, the media took hold of the blog format and spawned sites like The Huffington Post and Buzzfeed.
But like most things, once corporate America got its hands on the blog, it turned it into a catchall for all of a company’s digital—wait for it—content. And that’s the way it’s been for years. Most small to mid-size enterprise and consumer brands have blogs, and many of them are creating outstanding content (and if you’re a brand and need to uplevel yours, we can help with that!). I get it. It’s hard to know what to call that section of your website that contains everything from company announcements to product updates, research papers to data reports. And herein might lie one of the problems. We keep calling it a blog, because it’s this potpourri of somewhat unrelated content.
So now that we’re really talking, maybe calling your digital content a blog isn’t the core problem after all. Maybe categorization is the hurdle, and that spotlight on your summer interns could find a better home (like on your team page?). Maybe white papers and e-books can be in a learning section. The possibilities are endless. And yes, websites are a pain to redesign and in some cases it is what it is (one of the only cliches I can really get behind).
At LaunchSquad and our in-house content agency, Original9 Media, we have resources sections on our sites (where you might be reading this!). Our mission is to create articles that convey our point of view on three specific areas—world events that we feel connected to, industry news and trends, and content about our culture. We want visitors to understand who we are as a company through what we post in those sections. Like many, we are keeping our sites simple, but we feel good about the organizational vision.
Still, I stand undeterred. Even if the only option is one place for all content, I don’t think it should be called a blog. After all, even bloggers don’t call themselves bloggers anymore. They’ve moved on to personal newsletters. Oh wait, corporate America has already gotten its hands on newsletters, too. And around and around we go!