Want to lease space in your client’s minds, by lever­ag­ing the time they spend on the web? 

Then it’s time to wake up.

To con­tinue from our last dis­cus­sion on this topic, the thing to wake up from is this dream of hyper-viral-marketing through the com­bi­na­tion of blogs and social media. 

Most peo­ple never will never be on the front page of DIgg. Most peo­ple don’t need to be on the front page of Digg, despite the links and traf­fic it can gen­er­ate. Most pop­u­lar sites have never been, and aren’t actively seek­ing that as a strategy. 

That’s because they know that for a busi­ness to thrive, while you do need those links, you can gen­er­ate them else­where. And while you do need vis­i­tors com­ing to your site, you need the type that con­vert. It’s not that DIgg traf­fic never does, it’s that there are more cost-efficient solu­tions, not to men­tion time-efficient ones for the major­ity of websites. 

And yet the dream of a mega-viral acci­dent is often the sell­ing point of build­ing a blog.

It goes like this. 

Jack hears about this cool site called Digg. He’s new to the Web, and doesn’t get how these things work — all the bet­ter for him on one hand. On the other, it’s that much eas­ier to get caught up in the hype, if the whole inter­net used to be hype to you. You find your­self ques­tion­ing all of your beliefs about mar­ket­ing, when you see how easy it is to start blogging. 

That is, if you’re like Jack. 

So you put together the fact that most Joe Schmoes who end up on Digg got there from blog­ging. Mostly peo­ple who’ve been blog­ging for a while. So you start blog­ging. And you start submitting. 

After all, how often does the reg­u­lar per­son or tiny com­pany get fea­tured cov­er­age on sites like Digg or Mixx with­out a blog?

And even if they never achieve that objec­tive, there are many avenues for blogs to have a series of mini-viral events, such as being retweeted on Twit­ter, or shared on Face­book enough to get one of the prized homepage-sidebar spots.

There are few for sta­tic sites. None for offline com­pa­nies that aren’t some­how plugged into the shar­ing network. 

And so that bal­ance is cov­eted by Jack. But Jack can’t get there, and because he started blog­ging to get on Digg, he stops. 

Few achieve the dream — which IS attain­able by the way. It’s a long shot but it’s not impos­si­ble. The main secret is that any­one can get on the front page of Digg — very few peo­ple can STAY there. 

Back to our discussion. 

The fact that it’s get­ting harder to achieve viral suc­cess could be another rea­son why blog growth is slow­ing. If one can’t get one’s blog link retweeted 10 — 100 times a day, it feels like blog­ging is point­less. It looks so easy to get peo­ple to retweet you, from the out­side look­ing in, so you feel like a loser if you can’t do it on your first try. 

When more peo­ple read blogs often, we were all more in touch with the fact that suc­cess is not instant. We often climbed the two year jour­ney of becom­ing an overnight online suc­cess together. So we saw the pains it took. We were both in the audi­ence and behind the cur­tain, as either fans of a blog or as blog­gers ourselves.

This was part of the magic of blogging.

If you’re pay­ing atten­tion, you can see why these heights of cov­er­age are increas­ingly dif­fi­cult to attain. Much of it goes back to the Laws of Media, par­tic­u­larly in being copied and shared. Those are the things we need to be suc­cess­ful in Social Media, as well. It’s not just the fact that we have to catch the eye of the per­son who is adapt­ing to stream­ing content.

It’s in for­get­ting these laws, because we’re not read­ing blogs and other resources as deeply. Based on just two of the laws in Kelly’s pre­sen­ta­tion which we talked about in the pre­vi­ous post, it becomes clear why the pace of blog­ging and pro­mot­ing via social media is increas­ingly dif­fi­cult to sustain.

First, the ele­ments that can’t be copied are few, and get­ting fewer. There was the first blog post about busi­ness blog­ging, then the first blog ded­i­cated solely to it. 

Now there are thou­sands of each. The ones that stand out do because they’re doing some­thing spe­cial that is well mar­keted to a large audi­ence that wants to read about it.

Sec­ond, being both share­able and uncopy­able is a del­i­cate balance. 

To be share­able though, at the same time as you main­tain this mar­ketable spe­cial­ness, you have to make your work portable, but still own-able by you or at least trace­able to you– that’s if you intend for con­tent to ulti­mately mar­ket you. 

They have to at least be able to copy the whole if not the parts– per­haps by embed­ding the video but not being able to change it. They need to be able to ref­er­ence it, if not rip it — if it’s an arti­cle in your blog there at least has to be a link to be copied and passed around.

So how do you write this mys­ti­cal, mag­i­cal blog post every day, at least while you’re launch­ing — that will always be the thing every­one wants to talk about, read or share? 

You can’t.

It was hard enough before you had to com­pete with Face­book and Twit­ter for eyeballs.

That is so much the where and why of blogs for busi­ness are dying — the airy seduc­tion of pos­si­ble mega-viral star­dom is no longer just out­side our grasp, it seems like it’s on another planet. 

You have to be remark­able, full time, to even be seen. And if you have no other new media strat­egy, being seen is all there is. As lit­tle as a year ago, to have that kind of expo­sure, it was enough to be first, best or on-and-off “pretty good”.

Try­ing to keep up the pace of per­form­ing at your peak on a daily basis is exhausting. 

Unless it’s your full time gig, how will you pay bills and blog? Peo­ple who are able to do this are writ­ing, research­ing and com­ment­ing all the time, every day, some even have rotat­ing staff whose only job is to write, or to fol­low RSS feeds to get scoops.

Rarely is it the entre­pre­neur anymore. 

Because when you as a busi­ness per­son are able to cre­ate this share­able special-ness, one of three things happens. 

No one cares.… or it seems that way because you were so busy cre­at­ing, you couldn’t mar­ket, mak­ing it an exer­cise in speak­ing into the wind… or… 

Every­one cares… and now you have a scal­ing prob­lem of time, cost, resources, or knowledge. 

Who is going to write more of this brilliance? 

Who is going to pay for all this bandwidth? 

How can man­age the growth that occurs from becom­ing popular? 

How does this pop­u­lar­ity trans­late into money?

Even if you’re pre­pared for it, it’s no picnic.

In the final sce­nario, if nei­ther of those two extremes hap­pens, you may have a medium luke­warm car­ing that barely puts you ahead of where you are. 

If you’re mainly blog­ging as an entry into search results, that’s not much of a big deal. Of course, blog­ging will then always give you this luke­warm reward. Just make sure you’re still writ­ing above the level that will get you sub­scribers, links and sales or you’re spin­ning your wheels.

Of course, if that’s all you wanted out of blog­ging, you prob­a­bly wouldn’t be read­ing this.

Because then busi­ness blog­ging becomes this thing you have to do because your com­peti­tors do it and you don’t want to lose mar­ket share in the search engines. You know that’s the eas­i­est in if you have the right strat­egy, but the ques­tion becomes how to imple­ment it in a fresh, new way. 

So what IS the right New Media strat­egy for Busi­ness if it’s not just about paving an entry into search engines? 

That’s the ques­tion we’ll answer next.

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