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Sunday, 25 February - 15:09 (Category: Commentry )

Bloggers! Use a Damn Synopsis

SYNOPSIS: The value of a blog entry can be easily augmented by a synopsis like this one briefly explaining the entry before the reader commits their time.

I am about to say something both ridiculous and hypocritical. Blogs drive me mad. (Yup, this is a sort of hypocritical oath!)

I have a real problem with this because I am desperately trying not to do that very thing which I am about to criticise the majority of bloggers are doing. This article will probably point both barrels at my feet and pull the trigger but before I perform cyber dismemberment let me expound on what I mean.

I have been doing a lot of reading. While actually, I haven't. What I've been doing is a lot of skimming. I have been fighting my way through the world of the Blogger and I am just completely fed up with the absence of any useful and usable content. I've been on quite a few marketing blog sites and I have to say my transatlantic colleagues are absolutely the worst at this. They don't obey the first principle in business which is, know what your client's need is and satisfy it. Instead, I have to wade through mountains of gibberish just to get to the titbit on information I was promised would change my life in the heading. (I would dearly love to show you some specific sites but I value my person, so just take it from me, a lot needs to be done.)

The fact is that a blog should not be a stream of consciousness (like this!), it should not be pointless and it should certainly not be so packed with advertising that the message is utterly diluted. Come on guys, get to the point or at least have a point.

I don't know many busy business people who have the time to spend reading, what may be unsatisfactory, blog articles. Let's have a look at the psychology of this. When people visit the Microsoft site they automatically trust what is being said. The same is true of an academic research paper. (This is why Google places so much emphasis on the latter, so if you are linked by an academic website Google will throw you up the rankings.) The point here is that there are certain institutions which you will visit on the Internet as a reader because you know you will get something valuable from the time spent reading. Now compare this with a blog website. You are about to read an entry from someone who you don't know, whose affiliations you cannot trust, and who may or may not have something useful to say to you. The question the busy business person ask themselves is "do I have the time to waste?". The answer is invariably, no.

By the way, this is the reason why academics always put a synopsis at the head of their article. They understand the importance of time when researching. (Blogging has something to do with ego but it is about time we showed our readers more respect. Let’™s put our egos to one side an not assume that our readership are going to uncritically read everything just because we've written it.)

So this is my call to arms for all of you bloggers out there. We are an untested and initially untrusted source. If we want people to read and take us seriously we must restructure the way we say it. We should provide a synopsis of our blog entry which condenses the salient points from beginning to end. So, when Miss Busy Executive visits our blog she can see precisely what she is going to get before she invests the time reading.

Posted By:Jed Wylie at 15:09, 25-02-07