My blog over the past week has been an object lesson in the value of consistency, freshness and continuity for content.
As regular readers know, I started out my career as a reporter and editor. With my blog, I’ve got a fairly programmed plan for each week. I want to post two or three items a day; I want to have a reasonable distribution of items covering media, the housing market, social media and broader economic trends; I want to try to do one or two longer pieces each week combining information and analysis from several different sources. And, I want to have three or four different conversation threads running through the blog, so that there is participation and energy among the readers.
That plan is a guideline that assures me that the people who are making the investment to read and engage will have a consistent experience, that they’ll find things to interest them and that they will continue to come back again and again.
This kind of planning is old habit for me, but it’s at the essence of what makes for good interactive content — whether you are doing marketing or you are building an information audience.
When things go stale, the after-effects are bad.
Traffic falls off.
Your credibility erodes.
Dialogue tails off.
Now, I had a busy week: I had a board meeting to prepare for, a significant initiative to launch within our company and a series of core documents to develop for a new product launch. Also, I have two big concepts that I’ve wanted to lay out in the blog and they require more planning and thought than normal posts.
To the people who are engaging with my blog, none of that really matters. They might wonder idly why I’ve tailed off. Then they stop paying attention.
That’s the challenge for companies that are looking at doing social media marketing — who want to blog, to manage a Facebook page, or to get active on Twitter. They need a plan, they need consistency and they need freshness. Without it, they run the risk of significantly hindering the growth of their brand.
It’s interesting. A few days off from writing posts for VHF and I can feel its foundation beginning to sift away.
Well, now back at it.
