Don't Outsource Your Soul

A good friend of mine who runs a marketing consultancy recently told me that he had a client who was looking to outsource their blog to a vendor.  Not the strategy, development or hosting of their blog – but the actual writing of the blog.  I told my friend that wasn’t something Accession Media does and I thought that went against the entire philosophy and tenants of blogging as a communication form.  How can you expect an outsourced vendor or writer to truly become a part of the fabric of your company for a few hundred dollar a month retainer?  You are your best source of this type of content – or someone within your organization already.

The whole reason a company blogs is to express their unique point of view on whatever product or service they offer and how it is positioned in their marketplace.  This unique point of view should help differentiate them from their competitors.  If you don’t have a unique point of view – or as the marketing folks call it a “unique value proposition” – what are you doing?  Just getting by?  In that case, again, no need to blog.

The point here is that, if you are going to use blogging as a marketing tactic, yes a few mechanical entries a week could help out your SEO.  If they aren’t written by you but they do contain the important keywords you are looking to rank well for, this might be successful.  However to really use a blogging platform to its fullest, you really need to put a bit of your corporate “soul” into it.  Let the platform help you point out how your product or service is better than all the others out there and show customers how you are different than everyone else.  I know you know how you are different and better – but does your customer? 

And regardless of all that – you know what happens to those that outsource their souls!  :-)